Speaker
John Sarrao
(Los Alamos)
Description
Mesoscale science embraces the regime where atomic
granularity and quantization of energy yield to continuous
matter and energy, collective behavior reaches its full
potential, defects, fluctuations and statistical variation
emerge, interacting degrees of freedom create new phenomena,
and homogeneous behavior gives way to heterogeneous
structure and dynamics.1 Mesoscale science builds on the
foundation of nanoscale knowledge and tools that the
community has developed over the last decade and continues
to develop. Mesoscale phenomena offer a new scientific
opportunity: designing architectures and interactions among
nanoscale units to create new macroscopic behavior and
functionality.
MaRIE, for Matter-Radiation Interactions in Extremes, is Los
Alamos National Laboratory’s facility concept for addressing
decadal challenges in materials, especially in extreme
environments, through a focus on predicting and controlling
materials microstructure at the mesoscale. MaRIE will be an
international user facility and will enable unprecedented
in-situ, transient measurements of “real” mesoscale
materials in relevant extremes, especially dynamic loading
and irradiation extremes. Concurrent advances in multi-scale
modeling and computational resources hold great promise for
rapid progress toward these goals.
In this presentation we will discuss both the science
questions that motivate the mesoscale opportunity and how a
particular facility, MaRIE, can address a subset of these
challenges. Importantly, theoretical and computational
advances that enable effective data utilization are of
comparable significance and challenge as the acquisition of
said data. Our recent experience in attempting to pursue
this vision of prediction and control at the mesoscale will
form a central element of the presentation.