This award partially funds a high-level full-time technician to operate and maintain a Focused Ion Beam / Scanning Electron Microscope instrument. This position is essential for enabling the national geophysics support program planned for this instrument. The FIB/SEM, with purchase cost greater than $1M, has been purchased for nanomaterials research on the UC Riverside campus. Provision of this technician will enable shared use of the instrument as a "partnership" between UC Riverside and the NSF via the COnsortium for Mineral Properties Research in Earth Sciences (COMPRES) to provide access for members of COMPRES institutions to a FIB/SEM instrument for "mail-order" specimen preparation for transmission electron microscopy (TEM). User fees will be charged to all users but the NSF support of this technician will significantly defray costs to users in geology/geophysics. This concept has been endorsed by COMPRES, which has granted additional funds toward the yearly cost of the program. Although many advances in geology and geophysics (and in particular in mineral and rock physics) have been achieved through use of TEM since development of the ion-bombardment thinner in the late 1960s, application of TEM has been significantly constrained by the great difficulty and time involved in specimen preparation. Development of the FIB/SEM instrument now allows preparation of TEM specimens ("foils") from precisely located sites on polished surfaces of essentially any inorganic material and at least some organic materials (polymers). The fundamental problem facing wide-spread use of such instrumentation in all branches of the Earth Sciences that deal with solids has been the very high cost of the instrument, its similarly high annual maintenance costs, and the need for a highly-trained, dedicated technician to operate it. The partnership being established with the funding of this technician will now circumvent these problems, leading to a much lower cost than current commercial availability. It is estimated that a price of ~$100/foil will be attainable when the program is fully operational.
