This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
0923083 Gellman
High throughput methodologies have the capacity to accelerate progress in the surface science and materials science of multicomponent materials such as alloys. High throughput methods couple the preparation of libraries of multicomponent materials of many compositions with efficient analysis of the properties of the entire library. Development is proposed of an ultra-high vacuum apparatus housing a device for deposition of thin alloy films with lateral composition gradients. These composition spread alloy films (CSAF) will contain all possible binary or ternary alloys, The UHV apparatus deposition tool will be interfaced with a commercial apparatus for high throughput surface analysis that is being purchased independent of this proposed instrument development effort. It will allow automated, point-by-point analysis of the sample surface using angle resolved x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS) and low energy ion scattering (LIES). These methods will determine the composition of the near surface region, the composition of the topmost atomic layer, and chemical state information of the CSAFs; all resolved as functions of bulk composition or nanoparticle size. The bulk structure of the CSAFs will be determined ex situ using an automated orientation imaging microscope developed at Carnegie Mellon. These bulk and surface analysis methods are sufficient to allow complete local characterization of bulk and surface alloy properties with <1% resolution in composition space on a time scale equivalent to that for preparing a CSAF (~1 day).
