Yale Bulletin and Calendar

September 30, 2005|Volume 34, Number 5

Pictured are MRSEC team members (front row, from left) Eric Altman and John Tully of Yale and Christine Broadbridge of Southern Connecticut State University; (backrow) Victor Henrich, Udo Schwarz and Charles Ahn, all of Yale. Other members include Sohrab Ismail-Beigi and T.P. Ma of Yale and Yimei Zhu of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Materials research center established
with $7.5 million NSF grant

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a six-year, $7.5-million grant to establish a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Yale and Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), with participation from Brookhaven National Laboratory of Upton, New York.

"The award of the MRSEC grant is outstanding news for Yale science and engineering and indeed the entire scientific community of Southern Connecticut," says Provost Andrew D. Hamilton, Sterling Professor of Chemistry. "The NSF has recognized the strength of the materials research community here and the power of interdisciplinary efforts to solve really difficult problems."

The MRSEC research program will be highly interdisciplinary, bringing together members of the Departments of Applied Physics, Physics, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. In addition to promoting advances in science and technology, the center will bring new educational opportunities for students at all levels and for the general public.

The initial scientific focus of the Center for Research on Interface Structures and Phenomena (CRISP) is the surfaces of oxide materials and the "interface" where an oxide material joins with another material. Oxides are the most commonly occurring materials on Earth; some examples include sand (silicon oxide) and rust (iron oxide). More exotic oxides that will be studied by CRISP include high temperature superconductors and ferromagnets.

"Our MRSEC research will discover new kinds of electronic, magnetic and chemical behavior, and new ways to control and utilize them," says Charles Ahn, the Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) co-leader.

Atoms in the layers at the edge of an oxide material can behave very differently from those within the interior of the material. CRISP investigators will study this region with microscopy that can distinguish differences at the atomic level. They will apply a novel electric field technique to alter properties at the interface and then explore possible applications, including new electronic devices and chemical sensors.

"By combining the strengths of Yale, SCSU and Brookhaven, we will explore how the properties of artificially structured materials change as the size of devices constructed from them approaches atomic dimensions," says John Tully, the MRSEC director. "This will have important consequences for many areas of future technology."

Educational goals of the center include providing state-of-the-art research experiences for graduate students, undergraduates and New Haven area high-school teachers; increasing the numbers of women and underrepresented minorities in science; reaching out to New Haven area elementary, middle and high school students through laboratory visits, lectures and demonstrations at the Peabody Museum of Natural History; and increasing science literacy in future political and business leaders and members of the community at large. Christine Broadbridge, SCSU professor of physics, is the center's education director.

This program is one of only two new MRSECs that will be launched by the NSF this year. SCSU will receive $1,484,000, about 20% of the $7.5 million grant, with the remaining funds going to Yale. The center will develop state-of-the-art facilities for experimentation that will be made available to other researchers at SCSU and Yale, as well as outside users, and will establish working relationships with several industrial laboratories.

"The MRSEC will bring together diverse efforts on campus in materials science and engineering, and our facilities will enhance the research of other faculty and external users," says Victor Henrich, IRG co-leader.

Other faculty members from Yale participating in CRISP are Eric I. Altman, professor of chemical engineering; Sohrab Ismail-Beigi, assistant professor of applied physics and physics; Tso-Ping Ma, the Raymond J. Wean Professor and chair of electrical engineering and professor of applied physics; and Udo Schwarz, associate professor of mechanical engineering. In addition, Yimei Zhu, senior scientist and head of the Electron Microscopy Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory, is also part of the CRISP team.

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