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The long term goals of the Triangle MRSEC REU program are to maximize opportunities for undergraduate involvement MRSEC research, recruit diverse undergraduate students from across the country, and encourage and support future careers in materials science and engineering. Our 2012 class of REU students represented a diverse group of undergraduates with 50% females and 75% underrepresented minorities.

Altering crystal structure of unique magnetic films manipulates magnetization orientation Magnetic anisotropy defines the functionality in many applications including magnetic data storage, strong permanent magnets, and electrical transformers. Sr2FeMoO6 (SFMO) and Sr2CrReO6 (SCRO) are unique magnetic materials whose strong anisotropy aligns with crystalline structure (“magneto‐crystalline anisotropy”) that arises from the heavy elements Mo and Re. Researchers at The Ohio State University’s Center for

Anil Virkar, Ajay Nahata & Brian Saam Leveraged new (non-MRSEC) funding $240k: Arion mill, laser marker, FIB dep materials, S/W. Scientific Computing & Imaging integration of diverse imaging data sets. Magnifies MRSEC investment into FIB and planned S/TEM. Click the pdf below for more information

Life and Death at the Interface (.PDF)

Researchers Discover the Grail of Graphene Electronics: Semiconducting Graphene (.PDF) The stumbling block to developing graphene electronics has been the inability to produce a semiconducting form of graphene.  Researchers at the Georgia Tech MRSEC have finally found a solution to this elusive goal, graphene bent over SiC steps.  This semiconducting graphene can operate at temperatures above 200 C and is easily scalable to industrial fabrication.

Bridge Program for Physics Graduate Students OSU, CEM and the OSU Department of Physics have established and funded a M.S.‐to‐Ph.D. Bridge Program at OSU; OSU is one of the first sites funded by the American Physical Society Bridge Program. The program seeks to enhance the diversity of qualified applicants to physics Ph.D. programs at OSU and at other universities. The first cohort of students for this 2‐year transitional M.S. program will begin in June 2013.

  Most conventional materials are assembled from inanimate building blocks. We have explored the behavior of soft materials in which constituent energy consuming units that are assembled from animate energy consuming components.  Thousands of these components spontaneously coordinate their microscopic activity to yield novel gels, liquid crystals and emulsions that crawl, flow, stream, spontaneously fracture and self-heal, thus mimicking some of the characteristics of living biological organisms. 

One avenue to creating new materials with useful electronic properties is to take existing materials and modify their structure at the level of the bonds between the constituent atoms: this is feasible because the distribution of electrons around an atom is sensitive to subtle atomic-scale distortion of its bonds. For this type of approach to succeed, one needs theoretical input on how the atoms should be arranged to achieve some desired electronic distribution.

Metals that are glasses and can be formed like plastics are called bulk metallic glasses (BMG). But not all metals can be glasses and one has to sort through a large number of chemical compositions to find a good BMG. a trial and error processes could take up to a day to decide if a single composition can be molded. Sorting through hundreds of BMGs that are composed of four chemical elements would take up to a year. Now, with CRISP’s new combinatorial deposition system, more than 800 different compositions can be synthesized and characterized in a day.