Postscript

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  Meeting Chairs Robert J. Hamers (University of Wisconsin-Madison),
  Jeffrey C. Gelpey (Mattson Technology), Christine A. Orme
  (Lawrence Livermore National Lab) and Paul Muralt (Swiss
  Federal Institute of Technology)

The 2008 Materials Research Society (MRS) Spring Meeting concluded in San Francisco on Friday, March 28. It was a very successful meeting with record attendence (for an MRS Spring Meeting) of around 4100, an outstanding technical program, and various events and activities through the week. The topical thread of Energy weave through and was a crucial part of the programming and special events. We hope you enjoyed receiving and reading the Meeting Scene e-mails from San Francisco. Please feel free to let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.

"SCIENCE AS ART" COMPETITION WINNERS

FIRST PLACE WINNERS


S.K. Hark, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Field of Sunflowers
Amorphous SiOx nanowire bundles have an uncanny ability to self-assemble into various shapes, including one that strikingly resembles a sunflower. In these sunflowers, highly packed bundles form the disc florets and loosely packed ones around the rim of the disc form the ray florets. The SEM image shows a field of sunflowers. The grey scale image was mapped into pseudo-colors by graphic software. The nanowires grew out of the reaction of Si and oxygen, with molten Ga and Au acting as catalysts. Each nanowire is about 10 nm in diameter and tens of micrometers in length.


Zihong Liu, Stanford University, USA
This is a cross-polarized light optical microphotograph of an array of organic thin-film transistors (OTFT) fabricated with newly synthesized, highly crystalline 4T-TMS organic semiconductor deposited by newly developed solution-shearing method. Besides the excellent performances these new OTFTs exhibited, this microphotograph represents itself an aesthetic landscape painting full of beauty and art: different parts of the cross polarized thin film look like lakes, lands, mountains and sunglows, while the gold electrodes of the transistors seem to be a fence between lakes and far-away mountains...

Blythe Gore Clark, Max Planck Institute for Metals Research, Stuttgart, Germany
Inferno
Color-enhanced TEM micrograph showing twins and strain contrast in a post-compression [111] NiTi micropillar. The micropillar was produced via FIB milling and was compressed using a nanoindenter equipped with a flat punch. By creating and testing compression pillars in a range of diameters, this method allows us to study the effect of size scale on the shape memory behavior of NiTi.

Violeta Navarro, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
AFM image of a sputtered Au(001) single crystal.


Hui Ying Yang, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Color added to a ZnO nano-needle SEM image. The nano-needles looks like beautiful mountains in a Chinese painting.


Georff Brennecka, Sandia National Lab, USA
This image is of some contamination (probably monodisperse polystyrene spheres from a previous user) in the microscope which just happened to collect at the corner of a Ta₂O₅ particle. The image was collected using secondary electrons in a Hitachi S-4700 SEM and was colorized using the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP).

2008 MRS ENTREPRENEURSHIP CHALLENGE COMPETITION WINNERS

Tuesday evening’s competition finals for the MRS Entrepreneurship Challenge gave attendees a look at what it takes to pitch an idea to practicing venture capitalists. Now in its third year, the MRS Entrepreneurship Challenge continues to help our members develop the entrepreneurial skills that get their ideas out of the lab and directly into the marketplace. After an introduction to the competition goals and format, the three finalist teams pitched their materials technology based business plans to a panel of six judges from the venture capital community. The questions from the judges were challenging, but were well addressed by the teams.

The participants enjoyed a celebratory reception and dinner following the presentations where they were introduced to the creators of the competition, the venture capitalists that participated as judges and sponsors, and MRS officers and HQ executive staff. The grand prize award of $3000 was presented with a laser etched crystal award to Washington State University team Romit Dhar and Avimanyu Datta. Team mentor, Therus Kolff, was in attendance as well as the team accepted the award for their business plan entitled, "Cost Effective Single Crystal Piezoelectric Devices for Energy Harvesting and Transduction". Ohio State University team – Scott Bridgeman, Jitendra Kumar, Christopher Jaworsky, Cecilia Shiroma, Adam Winter and mentor Peter Rogers - " Biodegradable Polymer for Increased Cell Proliferation Rates" and Ohio State University/University of Cincinnati team – Mihaela Jekic, Bruce Caldwell, Aaron Sander, Eric Cochran, Seth Cramer and mentor Paul Dymerski - " Nanosize Gene and Drug Delivery Device Propels Research" were presented awards as well.

Grand Prize
Team 15: Cost Effective Single Crystal Piezoelectric Devices for Energy Harvesting and Transduction
General Technical Area: Single Crystal Growth, MEMS Devices

          Technical Lead: Romit Dhar, Washington State University
          Business Lead: Avimanyu Datta, Washington State University - College of Business

Runners-Up
Team 13: Biodegradable Polymer for Increased Cell Proliferation Rates
General Technical Area: Biotechnology, BioPhysics

          Technical Lead: Scott Bridgeman, The Ohio State University
          Business Lead: Jitendra Kumar, The Ohio State University
  

Team 14: Nanosize Gene and Drug Delivery Device Propels Research
General Technical Area: Biotechnology, Nanotechnology

          Technical Lead: Mihaela Jekic, The Ohio State University
          Business Lead: Bruce Caldwell, University of Cincinnati - College of Business
  

TECHNICAL TALKS

Symposium I: Synthesis and Metrology of Nanoscale Oxides and Thin Films

Effects of Alternative Oxide Dielectrics on the Si-SiO₂ Interface
“The abrupt Si/SiO2 interface is a wonderful gift of nature that has allowed the microelectronics industry to thrive for more than 50 years”, said Sokrates Pantelides from Vanderbilt University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory delivering an invited lecture in Symposium I on Friday. However, atomistic understanding of this interface is still quite rudimentary. As industry moves towards high-k dielectrics such as HfO2, it is important to appreciate the key differences in interfacial properties. Pantelides and his colleagues have carried out first principle density functional theory calculations to study these interfaces and are able to explain several puzzling phenomena. For example, they have found that desorption-induced lateral diffusion barriers are responsible for the high temperatures experimentally required to form uniform SiO2 layers. The diffusion energy and reaction energy alone are unable to explain the high temperatures needed to form these layers. The speaker and his colleagues have also explored the diffusion of stray Hf atoms into the interlayer SiO2 region between Si and HfO2 dielectrics. Pantelides cautioned that the universal mobility curves that are commonly used for Si fail to accurately predict the mobilities of ultrathin silicon-on-insulator field-effect transistors (FETs) and Si devices based on HfO2 dielectrics

Imaging Order Parameter Dynamics and Energy Dissipation in Ferroic Materials on a Single Defect Level
Stephen Jesse of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, speaking in place of Sergei Kalinin, presented their work on piezoresponse force microscopy, or PFM. A powerful method for probing ferroelectric domains, PFM takes advantage the piezoelectric properties of ferroelectrics by applying a voltage to a sample and measuring the resulting surface displacement to map out domains. In his talk, Jesse overviewed some of the work they have done using spectroscopic mode PFM in order to probe domain switching dynamics. By mapping the switching behavior in ferroelectric nanostructures, he showed that they can differentiate intrinsic ferroelectricity from defects. He also promoted the method as a means for imaging nucleation and providing insight into domain growth. Jesse concluded by reminding the audience that their Oak Ridge facility is available to researchers and invited submission of proposals.

  
  Energy forum (Monday) speakers Martin Green, George
  Whitesides, Daniel Nocera and Chris Somerville (l to r)

Symposium P: Carbon Nanotubes and Related Low-Dimensional Materials

Axial Band Structure Engineering of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Targeting Electronic Devices
Zhongfan Liu from Peking University in China outlined some recent progress in the integration of carbon nanotubes in electronics achieved by his research group. Delivering an invited lecture in Symposium P, Liu mentioned that there remain several challenges in controlling the structure and chirality of nanotubes and in the fabrication of error-tolerant architectures for electronics. Liu and his colleagues have engineered intratube junctions within nanotubes, thus locally modulating the nanotube band structure, by introducing sudden temperature oscillations during nanotube CVD growth. Liu and his colleagues have also devised a nanotransfer printing technique to transfer arrays of ultralong nanotubes onto different substrates. This technique holds promise for applications such as flexible electronics and the transfer of nanotubes onto substrates patterned with organic self-assembled monolayers since these monolayers are unable to withstand the high temperatures present during the CVD growth process. Finally, Liu and his colleagues have been able to selectively electrochemically polymerize pyrrole around metallic nanotubes, which may form the basis for selectively obtaining devices with a controlled chirality. This versatile nanotube transfer technique has also been used to fabricate CMOS devices and transistors from nanotubes with a known chirality.

  
  Plenary speaker Michael Graetzel, Ecole Polytechnique Federale
  de Lausanne, Switzerland, (center) speaking with audience
  members after the plenary lecture on Monday.

POST-MEETING NOTES

         
         Meeting Chair Paul Muralt with MRS Executive Director
           John Ballance

  
  California sunshine through the large glass windows of the Moscone West center

  
  A dedicated meeting attendee

© Materials Research Society, 2008