Posted 5 hours ago
Xiaoli Tan and a team of campus collaborators used this transmission electron microscope at the Ames Laboratory's Sensitive Instrument Facility to study the effects of engineering defects into certain materials. Larger photo.
Photo by Christopher Gannon.
AMES, Iowa – Materials engineers don’t like to see line defects in functional materials.
The structural flaws along a one-dimensional line of atoms generally degrades performance of electrical materials. So, as a research paper published today by the journal Science reports, these linear defects, or dislocations, “are usually avoided at all costs.”
But sometimes, a team of researchers from Europe, Iowa State University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory report in that paper, engineering those defects in some oxide crystals can actually increase electrical performance.