Granular Materials
- PDF / 2,093,232 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 604.8 x 806.4 pts Page_size
- 0 Downloads / 220 Views
Granular Materials metals would be dominated by dirt effects, so why bother with experiments. Cody's curiosity, coupled with lack of familiarity with the literature, prevailed and with the enthusiastic support of Ben Abeles he began a systematic study of the optics of granular Ag and Au. As the experimentalist of the team, he ran the Cary spectrometer at night while functioning during the day as a laboratory director. Roger Cohen, as the theorist on the team, reinvented, to his later surprise, a more generalized version of the Maxwell-Garnett theory! Despite this broadening of the granular metals research at RCA, the generic nature of the granular phenomena was still not grasped. P. Sheng came to know granular metals in 1971 as a graduate summer intern at RCA laboratories. At that time, the transport characteristics of granular metals, such as the température and electric-field dependence of the conductivity, were not know. As a young graduate student joinThe story of how ing the granular group, he vividly recalls the excitement in the air and the anxious granular metals were anticipation of results from the laboratory. discovered at RCA As in the optical work, there was a feeling that, with Ben Abeles leading the charge, Laboratories is a the group was getting into a large unextextbook case of plored territory. serendipity and the Despite the intrinsic fascination of the matériel and the large amount of work unpredictable ways done to clarify their properties, granular of research. metals continued to be a "not-quite respectable" field of research in the early 1970s due to its "dirty" nature. However, the mid to late 1970s witnessed a transforSoon after this discovery, the range of mation in the status of granular research as granular materials, and phenomena that interest in disordered materials picked up. could be studied, were greatly enlarged by In particular, the use of granular metals for a more versatile and controllable technique percolation, localization, superconductivof co-sputtering metals and insulators inity, and optical studies essenrially intetroduced by Joe Hanak. What followed grated this once peripheral area of inquiry was a remarkably productive and créative into the main stream of condensed matter period at RCA as well at other laboratories and materials research. The first Electrical in which many new granular materials Transport and Optical Properties of Inhowere synthesized and their interesting and mogeneous Media (ETOPIM) conférence novel phenomena investigated. In fact, the of 1977, held at Ohio State University, sigcase can be made that there is a connection naled this transition. This fact was particubetween granular aluminum and the rélarly brought out in the séminal review cent discovery of the high Tc oxide superEditons Note: This description of the depresented at that meeting by R. Landauer. conductors. Accounts of this interesting velopment of granular materials is exAt about the same time, the rise of oil inhistorical point are given by Alex Millier cerpted from the Préface to Ph
Data Loading...
