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Blobrana


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Silicon
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Silicon can be made to melt in reverse

Like an ice cube on a warm day, most materials melt - that is, change from a solid to a liquid state - as they get warmer. But a few oddball materials do the reverse: They melt as they get cooler. Now a team of researchers at MIT has found that silicon, the most widely used material for computer chips and solar cells, can exhibit this strange property of "retrograde melting" when it contains high concentrations of certain metals dissolved in it.
The material, a compound of silicon, copper, nickel and iron, "melts" (actually turning from a solid to a slush-like mix of solid and liquid material) as it cools below 900 degrees Celsius, whereas silicon ordinarily melts at 1414 degrees C. The much lower temperatures make it possible to observe the behaviour of the material during melting, based on specialised X-ray fluorescence microprobe technology using a synchrotron - a type of particle accelerator - as a source.
The material and its properties are described in a paper just published online in the journal Advanced Materials. Team leader Tonio Buonassisi, the SMA Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Manufacturing, is the senior author, and the lead authors are Steve Hudelson MS '09, and postdoctoral fellow Bonna Newman PhD '08.

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Blobrana


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Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have discovered a phenomenon long thought not to exist. They have demonstrated a mechanical fatigue process that eventually leads to cracks and breakdown in bulk silicon crystals. Silicon the backbone of the semiconductor industry has long been believed to be immune to fatigue from cyclic stresses because of the nature of its crystal structure and chemical bonds. However, NIST examination of the silicon used in microscopic systems that incorporate tiny gears, vibrating reeds and other mechanical features reveals stress-induced cracks that can lead to failure. This has important implications for the design of new silicon-based micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) devices that have been proposed for a wide variety of uses. The article abstract is available from Applied Physics Letters.

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