Charles Tu Grows the Materials that Build Technology

The North American Molecular Beam Epitaxy (NAMBE) Advisory Board and Veeco, Inc. will honor electrical and computer engineering professor Charles Tu with its MBE Innovator Award on Aug. 16 for significantly advancing the field of Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE). MBE is a versatile research tool for growing single-crystalline films atomic-layer by atomic-layer in order to build devices like high-performance transistors, lasers and solar cells. Tu is also associate dean of the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering. The award will be presented at UCSD during the annual NAMBE conference banquet.

MBE systems traditionally relied upon ultra-pure solid elements, such as gallium and arsenic, which could only be used to grow arsenides, leaving out other compounds that are important in fiber-optic communications.

When Tu came to UCSD in 1988, he set up one of the first gas-source MBE systems in the United States, enabling his research team to grow a wider variety of materials -- including arsenides, phosphides, nitrides, and mixtures of them – than was previously possible. Currently, Tu is growing dilute nitrides – a new class of materials pioneered in his shop over the past 12 years – for intermediate-band solar cells and nanowire solar cells.

The MBE Innovator Award recognizes individuals whose innovative work has significantly advanced the field of MBE in materials research, device development or commercialization, or equipment development.

Research Expo Hot Posters

We put together summaries of a hand full of posters that grad students will present on Thursday at Research Expo. Read about the hot posters here. Below is one such poster...and it has to be hot...just look at the heat pulsing from that photos above. What is it? It's the new composite material...and it's both strong and tough. So look out! And look up more cool posters here.

New Material: Strong and Tough

NanoEngineers have created a new class of materials that are both incredibly strong and tough — an attribute combination that has traditionally been difficult to find in the same material. The new structural materials, which could find their way into aerospace and biomedical applications, are lighter than steel and twice as strong. The materials withstand high stress without permanent deformation; and when they do deform, they bend before they break. The materials are relatively inexpensive because they are made from materials already used in titanium alloys. NanoEngineering Ph.D. Hesham Khalifa, working in NanoEngineering Department Chair, Professor Kenneth Vecchio’s research group, helped create the new one-step process for fabricating these “bulk metallic glass composite materials.” The materials were formulated on the computer, using modeling approaches to properly design nanoscale atomic clusters. A next step in the research is to begin customizing bulk metallic glass composites with tailored properties. One possibility: a metallic material with stiffness that begins to approach that of human bone and could be used in bone-implant technologies of the future.

Searching for the Tomb of Genghis Khan

Photograph courtesy of Michael Hennig

Searching for the tomb of Genghis Khan…that’s Albert Yu-Min Lin’s day job. He is a Jacobs School alumnus (BS [MAE], MS, PhD [materials science]) who runs the Genghis Khan tomb-exploration project through CISA3, which is affiliated with UCSD’s Calit2.

The National Geographic Society named Lin on of their Adventurers of the Year for 2009, and he is now in the running for the first ever National Geographic Adventure Readers’ Choice Adventurer of the Year.

Dig around the National Geographic Adventure Web site and learn about all the adventurers and then vote for the most outstanding.

Be sure to look through the photo gallery from Lin’s summer 2009 expedition to northern Mongolia’s Henity Province or “Forbidden Zone.”

What is so exciting about Lin’s adventure is that it didn’t stop when the crew returned from Mongolia. They continue to explore the Forbidden Zone via Calit2’s StarCAVE. Read all about it on the National Geographic Adventure Web site:

Read more in Doug Ramsey's Calit2 story.

Albert Lin, a Materials Science alumnus named an adventurer of the year

Jacobs School alumnus Albert Lin (Ph.D. 2008)is one of the world's top adventurers, according to National Geographic Adventure magazine. Below are a couple of paragraphs from the Calit2 story on the award.

It’s not often that a materials scientist by training gets to be labeled one of the world’s top adventurers. But that’s the honor bestowed on Calit2 research scholar Albert Yu-Min Lin, 28, in the December 2009-January 2010 issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine. Lin is affiliated with Calit2’s Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3).

Lin earned his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering in 2008. After graduation, “his mother, a former Hong Kong movie star, and his father, an astrophysicist, both urged him to get on with things as soon as possible, to find a job that would allow him to eat more steak, less ramen,” writes Luke Dittrich in the feature article, “Conjuring the Great Khan”, that is part of NG Adventure’s cover story. “Instead, Lin decided to begin his post-[doctoral] graduate career by organizing a high-risk, high-stakes project, one that offered little stability and even less promise of success.”

Read the full story on the Calit2 Web site.

Materials Science Professor Wins International Award

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) professor Marc A. Meyers won the 2009 Rinehart Award, given at the 9th Congress of the DYMAT Association on the Dynamic Mechanical and Physical Behavior of Materials Subjected to Dynamic Loading, held in Brussels, Belgium, from September 7 to 11.

The 2009 award was given to professor Meyers (UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering Materials Science and Engineering) and to Prof. Field (U. Cambridge, UK). Meyers is affiliated with UC San Diego's Materials Science and Engineering program, which is concerned with the structure, properties and applications of materials. This university-wide program aims to provide fundamental knowledge for understanding of materials with the objective of predicting, modifying, and tailoring the properties of materials to yield enhanced material performance.

Meyers was one of the Jacobs School professors recently profiled in an NSF video. Watch the video here. Read the transcript and learn more here.

Three hundred researchers from 29 countries attended the DYMAT congress, which was held at the Royal Military Academy. DYMAT is a European based global association coordinating activities in the domain of dynamic behavior of materials.

The citation in the plaque received by Prof. Meyers reads: For outstanding achievements to the understanding and modeling of the structure/ property and damage behavior of materials subjected to high-strain-rate and shock-wave loading. The award was given at the inaugural session of the meeting, after keynote lectures by Profs. Field and Meyers , by General Major Harry Vindervogel, commander of the Royal Military Academy, and by Dr. Richard Dormeval (CEA-France), president of DYMAT. The DYMAT award, established in 1990, is a global recognition, and past recipients are from the USA (4), Russia (1), Japan (1), Germany (1), and China (1).