2001 MRS Fall Meeting Highlights Innovations in Materials Research
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MRS NEWS
2001 MRS Fall Meeting Highlights Innovations in Materials Research The 2001 Materials Research Society Fall Meeting, held November 26–30, 2001, in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center and the Sheraton Boston Hotel, offered technical symposia in a range of areas, categorized into seven clusters: inorganic electronic materials and devices; photonic/optoelectronic materials and devices; thin films and surfaces; materials science, processing, and evaluation; nanoscale materials and processes; organic/biological materials and devices; and materials and society. Meeting Chairs Bruce M. Clemens (Stanford University), Jerrold A. Floro (Sandia National Laboratories), Julia A. Kornfield (California Institute of Technology), and Yuri Suzuki (Cornell University) introduced a new concept of a virtual Symposium AA on self-assembly processes, which consisted of joint sessions with symposia that crosscut a range of disciplines and topics. In a cluster on inorganic electronic materials and devices, researchers addressed microchemical reactors as potential sources of electrical power for handheld devices, and they described significant steps taken toward high-density nonvolatile ferroelectric memories. Speakers in Symposium E discussed issues ranging from the near-term commercialization of the first-generation BSCCO tapes to the development of the new MgB2 superconductor. Highlights of the cluster on photonic/ optoelectronic materials and devices included the growth of bulk GaN substrates, the addition of nitrogen in (In,Ga)(As,P) and related materials to reduce the bandgap, and the potential of a double-quantum-well system with possibilities to operate at room temperature for chemical and biological agent detection. In Symposium K on microphotonics, an announcement was made on the fabrication of 3D silicon photonic-
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bandgap crystals on a Si wafer. The researchers demonstrated how the standard Si-based microfabrication techniques may be applied to make devices out of these structures. In Symposium O on complex oxide heteroepitaxy, it became apparent that strain alone is incapable of explaining observed enhancement or suppression of the superconducting transition temperature of (La,Sr)2CuO4+λ in epitaxial films. Other highlights of the cluster of symposia on thin films and surfaces revealed, in the area of thin-film growth in electrolytes, that the introduction of one or more molecules that adsorb to the substrate leads to preferential deposition at protuberances, uniform deposition, or enhanced deposition in trenches. The latter process has led to the implementation of electrochemical deposition of copper metallization in the electronics industry, as reported in Symposium M. A growing interest in organic materials was seen in the cluster of symposia on organic/biological materials and devices. Artificial muscles are materials that combine sensor and actuator functions so that a stimulus causes the “muscle” to contract or expand. G. Spinks (Univ. Wollongong, Australia) used conducting polymers and carbon nanotubes as
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