This award supports a collaborative research project between Dr. Curtis Shannon, Department of Chemistry, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama and Dr. Unit Demir, Department of Chemistry, Ataturk University, Erzurum, Turkey. These investigators plan to study fundamental aspects of thin film structure and growth kinetics in materials grown by electrochemical atomic layer epitaxy (EC-ALE). This is a room temperature technique for materials growth that can be used to produce high quality, epitaxially oriented polycrystalline deposits in a layer-by-layer fashion on a wide variety of conducting substrates. They will specifically use in their studies two goals for better understanding of the growth mechanism. These are scanning probe microscopy studies of thin film structure and chronoamperometric studies of the rate of deposition processes during the EC-ALE growth cycle.
Scope: This award will allow a US scientist and a Turkish scientist with complementary expertise to pool their resources in a mutually beneficial study. Dr. Shannon is an established researcher in the electrosynthesis of thin film materials and their characterization by scanning probe techniques. Dr. Demir is a young scientist with expertise in the kinetics of electrodeposition. The project will involve a US graduate student from Auburn University who will work with the foreign collaborating scientist.
