MSE Department Seminar
The Hidden Orders in Disordered Materials: Expedition in Potential Energy Landscape
Glasses, as a disordered and non-equilibrium material system, do not have well-defined topological defects such as dislocations and grain boundaries. For this reason glasses have many promising physical, chemical and mechanical properties in comparison to their crystalline counterparts, making them attractive for a wide range of applications. However, also due to the lack of order and disappearance of lattice periodicity, building a valid structures-properties relationship in glasses has been a longstanding challenge.
Templated Solid State Dewetting of Thin Films and Nanostructures
Thin films used in microelectronic and other microsystems are metastable. If heated at sufficiently high temperatures they will agglomerate or dewet to form islands while remaining in the solid state. The temperature at which solid state dewetting occurs decreases as the thickness of a film is decreased and dewetting can occur well below a material’s melting temperature. The dewetting temperature also decreases as other dimensions are decreased, as in the case of the diameters of nanowires. Scaling of feature sizes in microelectronic systems has led to increasing pro