The Renewable Energy MRSEC at the Colorado School of Mines was instrumental in establishing a renewable energy undergraduate minor  that is unique because it features both a renewable energy track and a traditional energy track.  This approach is important because both types of energy will be important for the foreseeable future.

Understanding crack growth behavior in complex materials is critical to material design for damage tolerance.  An advancing crack, by virtue of its stress field, modifies the microstructure ahead of it including include changes in dislocation density, interfaces modification, decohesion of interfaces, void nucleation, and phase transformation .  Such changes in microstructure can in turn have a reciprocal effect on the advancing crack.  The problem is hierarchical in length scale and must be examined at the continuum, mesoscopic and atomic scales.

The unique microstructure and properties of amorphous materials make them attractive candidates for applications such as precision components in micro-electro-mechanical systems. There is  consequently great interest in fabricating sub-micron and nanoscale components of amorphous materials. This will require a thorough understanding of their properties.  

By tuning the optical lattice depth or the interaction between cold atoms, a weakly-interacting atomic bosonic superfluid can be converted into a strongly correlated Mott insulator. Near the phase boundary, quantum criticality, resembling that of Ising-type