Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Materials are the ""stuff"" all around us, underpinning new technologies which so greatly influence our lives. The long-term goal of our research is to delineate the underlying relationships between material structures and properties. Our approach is primarily experimental, and our aim is to select judiciously the systems which will provide the most information to answer carefully poised, fundamental questions. Our first theme concerns thermodynamic stability. One system to be investigated is the element boron. Surprisingly, several boron structures exist but it is not known which is most stable at ambient conditions. Another system is three-component organic mixtures that can reversibly change color in response to a change in temperature. Our goal here is to investigate the stability and structure of the competing complexes that give rise to color or remove color. A third system involves magnetic moments that cannot be fully ordered at low temperatures. The second major theme concerns how heat is transported in materials. We are particularly interested in new mechanisms of reducing thermal conductivity, and will probe this through experimental studies of systems ranging from pure materials (negative thermal expansion materials, metal-organic framework materials) to complex nanostructured composite materials, both natural and synthetic. Although our studies probe the fundamentals of material stability and mechanisms of heat transfer, they have important implications in applications such as thermoelectric materials for generation of power from waste heat, and thermally erasable toner for printers.