This award supports the PI, Shefford Baker, and two graduate students in a cooperation with Eduard Arzt of the Max Planck Institute for Metals Science and Metallography in Stuttgart, Germany. The research focus is on the deformation mechanisms in thin metal films in order to understand the microstructural origins of mechanical behavior which is unique to such films. The support will allow the graduate students, under the supervision of the PI, to spend time doing research at the Max Planck Institute as part of their Ph.D. work. One project will investigate very unusual mechanical behavior which appears to result from significant reversible plastic deformation that depends on oxygen content in thin copper films. The other project will study the effects of elastic anisotropy on deformation mechanisms in grains of different orientations in the two-dimensional grain structure of a thin metal film. The thin metal films being studied in this research are of increasing importance in technological applications such as integrated circuits, micromechanical components, optical coatings, and others.
