The Materials Universe Podcast: Trailer

[00:00:00] Abbey Stanzione: Welcome to the Materials Universe podcast. A podcast where we will explore the world of materials science and how it shapes our lives. My name is Abbey Stanzione, and I will be your host this season. Join me as I interview researchers from the Center for Dynamics and Control of Materials at UT Austin.

So you might be wondering, what is materials science? Well, that’s exactly what I asked Dr. Ed Yu.

[00:00:23] Edward Yu: Okay. Yeah. So that’s a great question. And we can start perhaps with, uh, you know, what are materials, right? And materials really are what constitute our physical world, right? Things that we can physically touch and feel that we use to build things.

And even, you know, that constitute our physical bodies. So then material science, or perhaps I’ll say material science and engineering, is really the study and the attempt to understand and control the structure and properties of different types of materials, how we can influence material structure and material properties through what we call materials processing.

[00:01:06] Abbey Stanzione: Tell us more about materials processing.

[00:01:08] Edward Yu: Materials processing is really, you know, how we manipulate materials. We might shape them into different structures. How does all of that influence their performance in different applications, right? And those applications really encompass, you know, almost everything, uh, or certainly many things that we deal with on an everyday basis.

So, for example, if you ride a steel versus an aluminum versus a carbon fiber. bicycle, then you can tell that their weights are very different, you know, how they flex is quite different. And, you know, it can have a very substantial influence on, uh, how the bikes perform in, uh, in different settings. And increasingly, perhaps you want them to promote energy efficiency so that they are good insulators from heat or cold, you know, let in sunlight under the appropriate circumstances for windows and, and the like.

in a field like sports. Uh, many aspects of sports, uh, are strongly influenced by materials. And then, uh, there’s the whole world of semiconductors, which are very prominent in current affairs right now. Uh, semiconductors are materials that, you know, essentially are the foundation for all of the chips that are used for Computing, communications, controlling small devices like your, uh, refrigerator or, uh, you know, maybe a, a toaster oven, you know, there are lots of chips in, in vehicles and the like.

And semiconductors are the foundational material, uh, for those chips. They have, uh, particular types of electronic properties in terms of how well they conduct electricity, uh, and especially how precisely. those electronic properties can be controlled. Uh, that’s really a key element in, uh, the importance and power of semiconductors in computing and communications and other applications.

And, uh, that is really, uh, turbocharged by our ever improving ability to take semiconductors and essentially shape them into very precise structures that then constitute things like transistors, resistors, uh, capacitors, and the like. Uh, and we can now do this really down to close to the atomic scale. And our improving ability to be able to do that, uh, is really what has enabled things like Moore’s law and the tremendous increases in power of computers, uh, and capability of computers that we’ve seen over the last several decades.

So those are just a few areas where, uh, we really see a very profound influence of materials in, uh, how we live our everyday lives and in our, uh, built environment.

[00:04:00] Abbey Stanzione: We will get to dive deeper into the world of materials science this season when I interview some of the faculty who are part of the Center for Dynamics and Control of Materials.

The CDCM is a research center that is predominantly at the University of Texas at Austin. And it’s funded by the United States National Science Foundation, which is a main federal agency that funds basic research in the United States. The center members are working on various topics in materials science and engineering, as well as in education.

The two major research directions the center is focused on right now, Dr. Yu, can you tell us about these?

[00:04:30] Edward Yu: The first of these, what it involves is working with different types of soft materials. So basically that means materials that are kind of squishy rather than, uh, than hard. So these could be. very small crystals of solid material, uh, they could be certain types of molecules, uh, they could be even, uh, type, certain types of biological materials like the fibers that make up, uh, muscle in human bodies and the like, and, uh, the fundamental concept is to be able to take basic material building blocks.

And, uh, to put them together into larger structures where by controlling the way that we introduce, uh, essentially energy into the material. And so, in a way, one can think of these as being, uh, sort of a very rudimentary version of stem cells for materials, right? Where you can take… fundamental, largely undifferentiated building blocks and build them up into many different types of, of structures, break them down into those building blocks, and then reassemble them into, uh, into something else.

All right, so, so that’s the basic idea in one of our two major research thrusts. The other major research thrust in the center right now involves what are called atomically thin, materials. And so these are materials that can be broken down into essentially extremely thin sheets of atoms that are bonded to each other, where each sheet is only, say, one to three atoms thick, uh, is, is what’s typical for these materials.

You might be

[00:06:10] Abbey Stanzione: thinking, how thin is atomically thin? Think about a piece of hair that is about 50 atoms thick.

[00:06:15] Edward Yu: So the most famous example of these types of materials is graphene, but there are many other, uh, of these types of atomically thin materials as well. And it’s really been, uh, one of the hottest and most exciting areas of materials research.

Generally now for a number of years, uh, what we’re doing here is looking at how we can take different atomically thin materials of this type and essentially stack these individual atomic layers on top of each other. All right. And By stacking them on top of each other and controlling the way the, really the atoms in these materials are aligned from one layer, uh, that’s stacked to the next and say controlling that by, uh, just shifting one layer with the other, uh, with respect to the other by a little bit or Uh, maybe rotating it or twisting one layer slightly with respect to the other.

So properties such as, uh, superconductivity, which is basically the ability to conduct electricity without any resistance. Properties such as magnetism and a variety of others, uh, can be created and controlled. in these materials just by changing a little bit about the way that they are aligned. And there’s really a host of applications that one can envision of these types of materials and the associated phenomena that I’ve described in technologies for computing, uh, communications, sensing, and, uh, and the like.

So, uh, so those are Uh, the two major research directions that we’ll be pursuing, and we have a number of, uh, other directions that, uh, that we’ll be looking at on a smaller scale that we’ll introduce as, uh, we go into the, the coming year. With the creation

[00:08:07] Abbey Stanzione: of this podcast, we hope to bring you some of the importance and the impact of materials and materials based technologies in our everyday lives, how that impact has come about.

And how it may come about in the future. Some of what may be coming could have implications in computing, communications, health, energy,

[00:08:23] Edward Yu: and more. For our younger listeners, we hope also that some of what we talk about in this podcast series will help to convey to you. our own excitement and passion for materials.

And maybe some of that will rub off on you as well. And you might be interested in or inspired to get involved in the world of materials more deeply in your educations and perhaps eventually in, in your careers.

[00:08:53] Abbey Stanzione: Join us for our upcoming season of the Materials Universe podcast, where we will be interviewing inspiring guests from different fields of science and engineering.

We hope you will enjoy listening to our interesting conversations and will learn something new. Please subscribe to our show and follow us on social media at Texas CDCM on Instagram and X.