The process can be applied to many materials metal and ceramic used for chips, gears, car bodies or even bridges. Gene is also working on a proposal to apply the technique to groundwater-flow research. By studying the crystalline structures of radioactive and heavy-metal contaminated metals, much can be learned about how they are transported in groundwater. We can now look deep into a sample, Gene says. There have been many theories on how grains affect the performance of thin films, or how the wires in ICs evolve toward failure.
Internal stresses are the forces, and up until now they have been totally invisible.
We would like to involve ORNL s computational groups in adapting that software to massively parallel processing, Gene says. The data from the microscope are so complex that it takes days to interpret an experiment. Researchers can finally determine what s happening to specific grains in a material instead of averaging the results. It s a far more direct and accurate approach, he says. People have been studying materials with X-rays for a long time, Gene states.