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NIRT research funding is renewed with an NSF FRG (focused research group)
Renewed funding has been awarded by NSF to a group made up in part of the NIRT group. The new grant is entitled "Beyond Crystallography: structure of nanostructured materials". The PI is Simon Billinge with co-PI's Chong-Yu Ruan (MSU physics), Michael Thorpe (ASU physics) and Mercouri Kanatzidis (Northwestern University chemistry). Below is a brief abstract describing the work:
A holy grail of nanotechnology is to design and build a material
with some desirable property by engineering the atomic structure at the
nanoscale. A huge impediment to this is the nanostructure problem:
the fact that the established quantitative methods for determining atomic
structure fail for nano-sized objects. This project addresses this problem
with a collaboration of experiment and theory. The experiments utilize
the intense beams of x-rays and neutrons available at US national
user facilities combined with novel computational approaches for extracting
reliable structural information from the data. In addition the local
structure of intermediate states will be studied using ultra-fast
femtosecond time-resolved electron diffraction, coupled to the same
computational infrastructure, allowing us for the first time to probe
quantitatively the local structure of excited states of nanoparticles.
In this study a number of scientifically and technologically interesting
materials will be studied, including quantum-dot nanoparticles and
phase-change materials used in writable CD and DVDs. However, the
theoretical and methodological developments will be made available to
the wider scientific and educational community in the form of freely
available software so the methods can be widely applied.
Submitted: Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 @ 12:45 PM By Simon Billinge
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Renewed funding has been awarded by NSF to a group made up in part of the NIRT group. The new grant is entitled "Beyond Crystallography: structure of nanostructured materials". The PI is Simon Billinge with co-PI's Chong-Yu Ruan (MSU physics), Michael Thorpe (ASU physics) and Mercouri Kanatzidis (Northwestern University chemistry). Below is a brief abstract describing the work:
A holy grail of nanotechnology is to design and build a material
with some desirable property by engineering the atomic structure at the
nanoscale. A huge impediment to this is the nanostructure problem:
the fact that the established quantitative methods for determining atomic
structure fail for nano-sized objects. This project addresses this problem
with a collaboration of experiment and theory. The experiments utilize
the intense beams of x-rays and neutrons available at US national
user facilities combined with novel computational approaches for extracting
reliable structural information from the data. In addition the local
structure of intermediate states will be studied using ultra-fast
femtosecond time-resolved electron diffraction, coupled to the same
computational infrastructure, allowing us for the first time to probe
quantitatively the local structure of excited states of nanoparticles.
In this study a number of scientifically and technologically interesting
materials will be studied, including quantum-dot nanoparticles and
phase-change materials used in writable CD and DVDs. However, the
theoretical and methodological developments will be made available to
the wider scientific and educational community in the form of freely
available software so the methods can be widely applied.
Submitted: Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 @ 12:45 PM By Simon Billinge
<< All News