The “small talk” of researchers in nanotechnology is extremely small. Their interest is in the physical phenomena occurring with things one-billionth of a meter in size, a million times shorter than the length of an ant, and up to 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. But the benefits to society of the science, engineering, and technology they’re doing at such tiny scales are huge.

In fact, more than 800 everyday commercial products rely on nanoscale materials and processes, according to the National Nanotechnology Initiative (nano.gov).

A central aspect of nanotechnology is that it allows essential structures of materials to be tailored to achieve specific properties that improve a variety of applications in medicine, energy, information technology, and many other areas.

One method of nanotechnology research involves the use of short laser pulses at minuscule fractions of a second to produce structural changes in thin, localized surface regions of various materials, such as gold, silver, or silicon.

Leonid Zhigilei, who heads the Computational Materials Research Group at the University of Virginia, says via telephone in this podcast that what attracted him to this type of research is the ability of lasers to excite and change materials in ways not possible with any other technique.

Dr. Zhigilei discusses the practical applications of zapping surfaces with short laser pulses. Laser ablation, which refers to the ejection of materials from the irradiated target, generates chemical-free nanoparticles that can be used in medical applications, for example.

Zhigilei says that because laser-induced processes are complex and happen so fast, experimentation cannot provide a detailed understanding of the structural transformations triggered by the rapid laser energy deposition.

Supercomputers provide the needed perspective.

The supercomputing resources of the National Science Foundation's eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) have played a critical role in many of the projects of Zhigilei's group.

Podcast host: Scott Gibson, Science Writer, National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the University of Tennessee

Written story: https://www.nics.tennessee.edu/zhigilei-laser-nanotechnology


Tiny Zaps, Big Results: Laser–Materials Research with Guest Leonid Zhigilei

Most of the podcasts presented here convey activities of the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), a project of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS). JICS was established by the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to advance scientific discovery and leading-edge engineering, and to further knowledge of computational modeling and simulation. JICS realizes its vision by taking full advantage of petascale-and-beyond computers housed at ORNL and by educating a new generation of scientists and engineers well versed in the application of computational modeling and simulation for solving the most challenging scientific and engineering problems. JICS runs NICS, which had the distinction of deploying and managing the Kraken supercomputer. NICS is a leading academic supercomputing center and a major partner in the National Science Foundation's eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). In November 2012, JICS sited the Beacon system, which set a record for power efficiency and captured the number one position on the Green500 list of the most energy-efficient computers.

Tiny Zaps, Big Results: Laser–Materials Research with Guest Leonid Zhigilei

Tennessee Supercomputing