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The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Kentucky focuses on the synthesis, characterization and applications of carbon nanotubes, carbon fibers, and nanotube and fullerene composites. The Center also provides seed funding for new opportunities in related areas. The Center supports efforts in materials education at all levels, including summer undergraduate research experiences and short courses and workshops on carbon materials. The MRSEC also supports shared experimental facilities that are accessible to center participants and to outside users, and has strong research collaborations with other universities and industrial laboratories.

Research in the University of Kentucky MRSEC is organized in an interdisciplinary research group that addresses the science and applications of advanced carbon materials. Participants in the Center currently include 10 senior investigators, 3 postdoctoral associates, 18 graduate students, and 1 administrative support staff. Professor Robert C. Haddon directs the MRSEC.

The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at University of California, Santa Barbara is focused on classes of material that are both chemically and structurally complex with a significant portion of the effort related to interfaces, including those between organic and inorganic materials. IRG 1, Biomaterial Microstructures, has evolved from the Complex Fluids IRG of the previous MRSEC, and carries out the enabling science for the development of biomaterial microstructure and solution aggregates that perform biological or biomimetic functions and serve as model systems for hybrid devices. IRG 2, Solution Synthesis of Inorganics at Molecular and Atomic Interfaces studies the roles of structure-directing molecules and surfaces in the hierarchical organization of inorganics synthesized from solution at low temperatures. IRG 3, Mesoscopic Macromolecular Structures, develops the principles for synthesis and processing of novel macromolecular structures that are heterogeneous on a mesoscopic scale and exploit these structures to control properties for electronic, optical and biotechnological applications. IRG 4, Strongly Non-equilibrium Phenomena in Complex Materials, applies atomic-scale microscopies and advanced scientific computing to bear on a diverse, but closely related, set of problems concerning deformation, failure, and structural reorganization of complex materials. The Center includes significant shared facilities located in a new Materials Research Laboratory building recently completed to house the Center.

The educational activities include development of evaluation methods to measure the degree of success that their outreach programs are having. Outreach projects include Santa Barbara City College Materials Interns; Research Interns in Science and Engineering; Research Experience for Teachers; and UCSB Scienceline, an internet link with Santa Barbara County science teachers and students, impacting both under-represented minority and female students at the college, and pre-college levels. Last year, these programs reached 28 undergraduates (12 women; 2 under-represented minorities) and 5800 pre-college students (3000 women; 4000 under-represented minorities). This is an interdisciplinary MRSEC with 31 faculty members, 15 post-doctoral associates and 24 graduate students from programs in Materials Science and Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Electrical Engineering, Geology, Mechanical Engineering, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry. Professor Anthony Cheetham directs the MRSEC.

Senior Investigators: William F. DeGrado & Daniel A. Hammer IRG Leaders; Feng Gai, Mark D. Goulian, Michael L. Klein, Virgil Percec

IRG-3 draws expertise from four departments to design fully integrated functional analogues of cellular mstrongbranes. The goal is highly stable mstrongbranes with integrated functional components including, ion channels, receptors, & signal transducers. strongploying the tools of molecular nanotechnology, the IRG will support both biological & bio-inspired synthetic approaches to these problstrongs.

Elucidating fundamental design principles connecting molecular architecture and charge physics with material properties in polymeric ionic liquids has the potential to revolutionize diverse applications including electrochemical membranes and soft robotics.  IRG-2 aims to understand how materials that incorporate delocalized ionic groups onto or within a low dielectric backbone self-assemble and how charge moves through these structures.  The team will further impart functional properties such as photochromism, multivalent ion conductivity, redox activity, magnetism, and reconfigurability through design and exchange of ions.

The grand challenge of IRG-2 is to develop oxides as semiconductors materials to replace nitride-based systems in the next generation of devices such as solid-state lighting. By exploiting the potential of new growth strategies for oxide semiconductors, controlling and understanding defects and impurities a sound experimental and theoretical understanding of oxides as semiconductors will be developed by a world-class, multidisciplinary team.

Principal Investigators
Claire E. White (Civil and Environmental Engineering)
George W. Scherer (Civil and Environmental Engineering)

* This seed is inactive.

Concrete is the second most used resource after water, and is employed throughout the world in a wide variety of industrial, infrastructure and commercial settings. Due to the extensive CO2 emissions that arise from ordinary Portland cement (OPC) production (5-8% of man-made CO2), low-CO2 concrete alternatives are fast emerging in the marketplace. A promising alternative, alkali-activated slag and/or fly ash cements (AAC), are known to reduce the CO2 burden by 80-90%, and therefore pose as promising candidates for creating a truly sustainable future. Nevertheless, in order to accelerate implementation of any new and transformative structural material in the built environment we must have a detailed understanding of its chemistry and physics, including the nature of the atomic structure.

The aim of the Seed 3 project is to develop an iterative modeling-experiment methodology that will produce experimentally valid and thermodynamically plausible atomistic representations of C-A-S-H and C-(N)-A-S-H gels, and therefore reveal the location and role of aluminum in these gels. This will be achieved by utilizing advanced X-ray scattering data combined with ab initio modeling. The outcomes of this transformative research are twofold; firstly, the generation of thermodynamically plausible structural representations of C-A-S-H and C-(N)-A-S-H gels; and secondly, the development of a modeling framework methodology that is highly relevant for elucidating the structure and thermodynamics of other important disordered materials, including glassy phases, amorphous carbonates, polymers, nanoparticles and any materials with intrinsic disorder at the atomic length scale. Hence, this research project will promote an unconventional level of interaction between modeling and experiment, and will encourage the development of innovative research approaches to accelerate implementation of new materials in society.

2016 Publications
V. O. Ozcelik and C. E. White, “Nanoscale charge-balancing mechanism in alkali-substituted calcium−silicate−hydrate gels,” Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 7, 5266 (2016).

IRG Senior Participants: 
Greg Fuchs (ApplPhys, co-leader), Gennady Shvets (ApplPhys, co-leader), Nicole Benedek (MatSci), Debdeep Jena (ElecE), Jeffrey Moses (ApplPhys), Farhan Rana (ElecE), Alejandro Rodriguez (ElecE, Princeton), A. Nick Vamivakas (Optics, U. Rochester), Huili Grace Xing (MatSci). 
Collaborators: Michael Flatté (U. Iowa), Peter Schunemann (BAE Systems)

The goal of this newly proposed IRG is to understand, create, and harness exceptionally strong light-matter interactions for scientific discoveries and future photonic information processing technologies. To date, optical information processing has been limited by the fact that photons typically interact only very weakly with each other; this IRG will aim to generate orders-of-magnitude enhancements in light-matter interactions, and hence light-light coupling mediated by these interactions. Our strategy is to unite materials and photonics expertise to develop new “structured materials,” consisting of thin layers and thin-film heterostructures designed to provide unique optical properties (e.g., stronger nonlinearities or better efficiency as single-photon sources compared to existing materials) which are then sculpted – sometimes in non-intuitive ways – to control light-matter interactions down to the nanoscale. If successful, this research will enable new, small-footprint optical information-processing platforms capable of operating at high speeds, with extremely high efficiency, at low power, and in some cases, in advanced quantum technologies.

This IRG aims to discover the coupling mechanisms between oxygen defects and the transport of phonons, spin and charge at the interfaces of metal oxides, and to control the extent of this coupling via electric field, strain, and electrochemical potential applied at interfaces. Oxygen defects play a central role in determining many electronic, chemical and phononic properties, with transformative implications for energy and information technologies including thermoelectrics, fuel cells, sensors, and memristive and magnetoelectronic devices. Within the fourth year of our project, the following key contributions were reported:

1) demonstrated a thermodynamic formulation to quantify the point defect formation energetics under high electric fields,

2) 3) 4) assessed effects of biaxial strain on the stability of different types of electronic defects, quantified the proton and oxygen defect effects on high-k oxides for magneto-ionics, demonstrated electrochemical phase control, to induce very large reversible changes in thermal conductivity (electrical heat valve) and electronic conductivity,

5) revealed oxygen vacancy-mediated magnetism and a strain-relieving morphology in perovskite oxides.

IRG Leaders: Robert W. Carpick & Andrea J. Liu

Senior Investigators; Paulo E. Arratia, Douglas Durian, Dan Gianola, Jerry P. Gollub, Daeyeon Lee, Ju Li and Arjun G. Yodh

IRG-3 studies disordered packings of atoms, nanoparticles, colloids and grains with a goal to to understand how localized rearrangements organize under extreme load to form shear bands, and thereby to develop ways of predicting whether systems are about to fail, and to make new, tough materials by designing their vibrational properties. In condensed matter systems, disordered packings are pervasive. Yet our fundamental understanding of the mechanical response of disordered packings lags far behind that for crystalline ones. In particular, the mechanisms controlling mechanical instabilities that lead to failure are not understood. This scientific gap impedes applications of materials such as bulk metallic glasses, amorphous thin films, and nanoparticle assemblies. To gain new insights into the failure process, the onset of mechanical instabilities and failure will be studied in disordered systems across a range of constituent particle sizes, from packings of atoms to packings of macroscopic grains. This comparative approach brings together researchers from fields that are currently disparate. IRG-3 leverages this collective expertise to study shear band formation and the onset of mechanical failure at each scale: (1) atoms in carbon-based films and metallic glasses; (2) nanoparticles in layer-by-layer (LbL) assemblies; (3) colloidal glasses; and (4) granular media. The atomic and nanoparticle systems are chosen because their mechanical properties are important in applications. The colloidal and granular systems are chosen both for their materials importance and as model systems that are straightforward to visualize and that offer fine control over particle interaction and particle shape and size distributions. The IRG's long range goal will be to use this knowledge to develop and test new design rules for fabricating novel materials with otherwise unattainable mechanical stability.