This award supports Don Lucca and students from the Oklahoma State University in an extensive collaboration with the universities of Aachen and Bremen in Germany. The PI's NSF research project is part of a U.S.-Germany Transregional Collaborative Research Center that involves sixteen technical projects centered on the development of processes for the manufacture of complex, high-quality optical components for next generation applications in information technology and telecommunications, health care, the life sciences, sensing, lighting, and energy conversion. There are technical projects in the areas of deign, had coatings, replication techniques, and measurement science and technology. Funding for the long-term research center, with the exception of the project here described, is being supplied mainly by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the German counterpart to NSF. The research focus of the U.S. project, "High Resolution Surface Zone Analysis," is the investigation of the near-surface mechanical nature of sol-gel derived diamond-turnable, hard mold coatings which will be used in the volume production of ultraprecision optics of polymers and glasses. Nanoindentation will be used to study the near-surface mechanical properties including elastic modulus and hardness, and the surface residual stress state of the hard coatings. Depth profiling studies will e performed on cross-sectioned and taper-sectioned coatings with a newly developed method for near surface zone analysis. The adhesion and delamination behavior of the mold coatings will be explored with the use of nanoscratching. The project will also further contribute to the development of advanced surface characterization tools needed for assessing the near-surface mechanical state at the nanometer scale. In addition to making extensive German expertise and facilities available to the US group of researchers, the collaboration will make it possible to train several US graduate and postdoctoral students in an international setting. This will give the students experience in international research collaborations and make it possible for them to establish international connections that could continue to be productive throughout their careers.
