Many emerging technologies are based on the development of advanced engineering materials capable of withstanding higher temperatures, higher stresses, and more aggressive corrosive and oxidizing environments, and more efficient and more sensitive functional materials for use in high technology products such as light-emitting materials, sensors, and lasers. Carbon and oxygen based refractory ceramics, and light element composites and alloys are potential candidate materials under development, and in which nuclear analytical facilities and spectrometries are available to support their research and development needs. Nuclear analytical techniques using heavy ions from particle accelerators have a demonstrated competitive advantage in that they can provide important information about the concentrations, distributions, and locations of light elements that are not readily available or accessible to non-nuclear spectrometries. This CRP will address identified shortcomings and limitations in the utilization of heavy ions through the delivery of better analytical tools with a higher degree of reliability, accuracy, and user confidence, thereby enabling an expansion in the range of problems addressable and solvable.
To help support Member States research and development needs in advanced engineering materials through the delivery of nuclear analytical tools with a high degree of reliability, accuracy, and user confidence.
Improved reliability and accuracy of nuclear analytical software codes for heavy ion beam characterization of light elements in materials.
Improved reliability and accuracy of reference heavy ion stopping powers in industrially important elements and compounds.
The overall output will be an increased accuracy for light element analysis with the heavy ion-ERDA technique. Better and more accurate algorithms will become available to include in data evaluation codes. Secondly, the new stopping power measurements will lead directly to improved accuracy in experiments where the same ion/target element pairs are present, but they will also be eventually included in the existing systematization and models of heavy ion stopping power available to the community, leading to overall better accuracy in heavy ion stopping power.
The successful development and deployment of advanced engineering materials requires solutions for many materials related problems and challenges. Many advanced materials derive their functional properties from compounds containing light elements designed and engineered to withstand high temperatures, high stresses, and corrosive and radiation-damaging environments. Nuclear methods are able to support and provide significant contributions to R&D in many of these areas if demonstrated to be effective and reliable.
However, a cross-cutting issue affecting all of the above cited application areas is that the reliability, quantification, and interpretation of data obtained by nuclear methods using heavy ion beams from accelerators is not satisfactory; it is being constrained by inadequacies and inconsistencies in the analytical software codes and basic ion beam data. The work done under this CRP helps to alleviate these deficiencies and inadequacies which in turn lead to improvements in the reliability, accuracy and confidence of experimental data obtained by nuclear analytical methods.