With this issue of our Newsletter, we present some exciting new results from our research groups. We are happy to report continued progress in all five of our center-wide projects.
Beginning with the Next-Generation Mesoporous Materials project, we are pleased to report on a patent awarded to the Caltech group for their zeolite-templated carbon materials, which exhibit very high isosteric enthalpies of adsorption for a number of gases at increasing pressures. The advance has important implications, not only for gas storage technologies, but also for the fundamental understanding of interactions between molecular species adsorbed on surfaces.
In the New Solar Materials project, Tim Strobel and other EFree scientists attended the first International Conference on Exotic Forms of Silicon, which was organized by EFree Partner Craig Taylor. EFree Scientists presented work from the Center in this exciting area of materials science. Meanwhile, there have been important recent developments in the New Nanophase Carbons project, with two new theoretical studies of the mechanism of nanothread formation and the enumeration of the many different classes of nanothreads. New theoretical calculations have predicted new high Tc hydrogen rich superconductors in the Electron Transport in Hydrogen-Rich Materials project, and several experimental papers are now in press. Recent work at APS and SNS by the Caltech group has led to new findings in the Ion Transport Processes project. All of these will be featured in detail in the next Newsletter.
Research begun in the previous phase of EFree continues to yield new and exciting results, as illustrated by the recent work on superconductivity in iron arsenide compounds by Elissaios Stavrou and co-workers. The correlation of structural features with superconducting properties represents a fundamental advance in this area of materials research and is reminiscent of work begun in the late 1980s on the high-Tc copper oxides. Work on exploratory projects also continues. EFree Affiliated Scientist, and former EFree Postdoc, Vincenzo Stagno (Ehime University) and colleagues report new information on the stability of a natural quasicrystal at high pressure and temperature. Key insights into the conditions under which such alloys are stable not only provide information on meteoritic processes, but also will provide information on the potential viability of this class of materials for energy applications.
Several new people have joined EFree since our last newsletter. Chen Li is active as the EFree Neutron Scattering Coordinator at the SNS. He serves as a liaison between EFree scientists and neutron scattering groups at SNS and elsewhere to facilitate the application of both existing and emerging neutron scattering techniques to EFree projects. At the same time, EFree High P-T Techniques coordinator Reini Boehler now has a 50% appointment at the SNS, which strengthens EFree support of the facility. Hanyu Liu has joined EFree as a Postdoctoral Associate at Carnegie. He is currently carrying out theoretical and computational studies in support of the Novel Transport in Hydrogen Rich Materials project. We are pleased to have Carolyn Koh (Colorado School of Mines) and Bianca Haberl (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) join us as EFree Affiliated Scientists. Additionally, Carnegie is hosting two summer undergraduate interns – Jackson Holaday from USC and Anne Davis from Caltech.
Finally, our Annual Meeting will be held at Carnegie on September 8-9. The meeting will serve as a venue for summarizing progress to date as well as identifying new opportunities for exploring energy materials in extreme environments. We look forward to your continuing engagement with our Center.
Sincerely,
