Atomic Scale Characterization and First-Principles Studies of Si₃n₄ Interfaces

Warren, R

Cable, M

These Proceedings, consisting of Parts A and B, contain the edited versions of most of the papers presented at the annual Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation held at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine on July 28 to August 2, 1996. The Review was organized by the Center for NDE at Iowa State University, in cooperation with the American Society of Nondestructive Testing, the Ames Laboratory of the USDOE, the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Institute of Standardsand Technology, and the National Science Foundation Industry!University Cooperative Research Centers pro gram. This year's Review of Progress in QNDE was attended by approximately 400 participants from the U.S. and many foreign countries who presented over 350 papers. As usual, the meetingwas divided into 36 sessions, with as many as four sessions running concurrently. The Review covered all phases of NDE research and development from fundamental investigations to engineering applications or inspection systems, and it included many important methods of inspection techniques from acoustics to x-rays. In the last eight to ten years, the Review has stabilized at about its current size, which most participants seem to agree is large enough to permit a full-scale overview of the latest developments, but still small enough to retain the collegial atmosphere which has marked the Review since its inception.

Advances in nanoscale science show that the properties of many materials are dominated by internal structures. In molecular cases, such as window glass and proteins, these internal structures obviously have a network character. However, in many partly disordered electronic materials, almost all attempts at understanding are based on traditional continuum models. This workshop focuses first on the phase diagrams and phase transitions of materials known to be composed of molecular networks. These phase properties characteristically contain remarkable features, such as intermediate phases that lead to reversibility windows in glass transitions as functions of composition. These features arise as a result of self-organization of the internal structures of the intermediate phases. In the protein case, this self-organization is the basis for protein folding. <br/> The second focus is on partly disordered electronic materials whose phase properties exhibit the same remarkable features. In fact, the phenomenon of High Temperature Superconductivity, discovered by Bednorz and Mueller in 1986, and now the subject of 75,000 research papers, also arises from such an intermediate phase. More recently discovered electronic phenomena, such as giant magnetoresistance, also are made possible only by the existence of such special phases. <br/> This book gives an overview of the methods and results obtained so far by studying the characteristics and properties of nanoscale self-organized networks. It demonstrates the universality of the network approach over a range of disciplines, from protein folding to the newest electronic materials.

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Lynch, Charles T