Mullins Receives Von Hippel Award
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Mullins Receives Von Hippel Award The Materials Research Society's highest honor, the Von Hippel Award, will be presented this year to William W. Mullins, university professor emeritus of materials science and engineering at CarnegieMellon University (CMU). He received the award "for pioneering and profound contributions to the understanding of grain boundary motion, morphological stability, the structure of surfaces and interfaces, and flow and diffusion as stochastic phenomena." The Von Hippel Award is given annually to an individual in recognition of outstanding contributions to interdisciplinary research on materials. Mullins was recognized for his major influence in materials science, particularly in the four categories cited above, with particular attention to grain boundary kinetics, morphological instabilities and surface topological changes, and making a connection between atomistic and phenomenological descriptions of step structures on surfaces. His early work treated interface motion under carefully controlled driving forces and eventually led to a much improved understanding of solid state capillarity and to a technique for quantitative and reliable measurements of self-diffusion coefficients on surfaces at high temperatures. Mullins's formulation of a theory for instability finally led to a deeper understanding of the origin of dendrites and other such shapes, as well as the inhomogeneities that are incorporated into crystals. He is known as a superb teacher and lecturer, and is well-known worldwide for seminars of particular clarity, with a gift for extracting, in its barest simplicity, the essence of a phenomenon. Mullins's work is based on an interdisciplinary approach, and represents a blend of the principles and techniques of physics, applied mathematics, and materials engineering. Most of his research has become the "bread and butter" of modern materials science and engineering. He has developed or strongly influenced work in grain boundary grooving, scratch decay, field emitter tip blunting, sintering, morphological instability, similarity in scaling laws for grain growth, influence of bias on the statistics of diffusion, and random walk kinetics of granular materials. In an early paper, Mullins idealized
two-dimensional grain growth in what is today called the von Neumann-Mullins "N-6" topological theory of grain growth, with "N" the number of sides of a grain. He demonstrated that the growth rate of a two-dimensional grain executing isotropic growth or shrinkage at each of its edges is solely dependent on the number of its vertices or edges. He was the first to show that metallurgical grains comprising a film or sheet, or other nearly two-dimensional arrangements will exhibit shrinkage if they have fewer than six sides, and growth if they have more than six sides. Six-sided grains neither shrink nor grow but wait until some topological event occurring in the near neighborhood of the grain changes its number of vertices or sides, then growth will occur. In the early 1960s, Mullins and CMU col
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