14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have just been awarded a $1.65 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The money will be used for building an electrostatic levitation chamber, which is to be installed inside the lab's Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), and act like a giant microscope. The instrument will be used to suspend very small droplets of liquids in mid-air, as investigators watch the individual movements of atoms inside, as they undergo a process of cooling and solidification.
One of the primary goals for the levitation chamber will be thoroughly analyzing a phenomenon known as glass transition. The new project will be headed by Ken Kelton, who is a physicist at the Washington University in St. Louis (WUSL). Kelton, PhD, is also the Arthur Holly Compton Professor in Arts & Sciences at the university, as well as the chair of physics. He says that the new instrument could potentially be used for a wide array of applications, and that it will use neutrons as probes. Figuring out glass transition would be an impressive achievement.
Many experts view it as a very intricate process, and Philip Anderson, a Nobel Prize winner, has even called it “the deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid-state research.” According to existing theories, the class of materials known as glasses forms when free-flowing liquids change smoothly into viscous liquids, before finally turning into a rigid structure. Theoretically, most liquids can form such glasses, but some materials, including metals, only do so when they are cooled at a high speed. Other materials only glassify when cooled very, very slow.
Finding out more about the atomic motions that lead to this type of phase transition will be the main goal of the neutron electrostatic levitation chamber (NESL). It will feature a huge observation power, which will enable it to observe and keep track of individual atoms, as their motions change to dictate the overall state of the material. The beams of neutrons that the SNS produces will be used as a source of probes for the new investigation, the ORNL team says, quoted by e! Science News.