I am humbled and honored to be here to tell you about a topic that is dear to everyone's heart—and vital to the future of our planet. My colleague, Richard Smalley, gave a presentation on this topic several years ago, at a similar MRS plenary session. Over the last few years of Dr. Smalley's life, he and I worked together, traveling across our country to deliver a message about a subject that we—like many others, both scientists and lay people— have come to believe is unequivocally the most important technological problem in the world: our global energy future. That is an incredibly powerful statement, one that during the next hour I hope to ably defend.

Advances in atomic-resolution environmental transmission electron microscopy (ETEM) and related techniques for probing gas–solid reactions in situ are described. The capabilities of ETEM allow the dynamic nanostructure of heterogeneous catalysts in their functioning states to be directly monitored in real time. Applications of ETEM in catalysis are outlined, and they illustrate significant new insights into the dynamic nanostructure of the catalyst materials and their modes of operation.

In the potential energy landscape theory of liquids, the energetic configurational landscape of a liquid is modeled using a potential energy function comprising a population of stable potential energy minima called inherent states, which represent the stable atomic configurations of the liquid. These configurations are separated by saddle points that represent barriers for configurational hopping between the inherent states. In this article, we survey recent progress in understanding metallic glass-forming liquids from a potential energy landscape perspective. Flow is modeled as activated hopping between inherent states across energy barriers that are assumed to be, on average, sinusoidal. This treatment gives rise to a functional relation between viscosity and isoconfigurational shear modulus, leading to rheological laws describing the Newtonian and non-Newtonian viscosity of metallic glass-forming liquids over a broad range of rheological behavior. High-frequency ultrasonic data gathered within the supercooled-liquid region are shown to correlate well with rheological data, thus confirming the validity of the proposed treatment. Variations in shear modulus induced either by thermal excitation or mechanical deformation can be correlated to variations in the measured stored enthalpy or equivalently to the configurational potential energy of the liquid. This shows that the elastic and rheological properties of a liquid or glass are uniquely related to the average potential energy of the occupied inherent states.

The interface between nanosystems and biosystems is emerging as one of the broadest and most dynamic areas of science and technology, bringing together biology, chemistry, physics, biotechnology, medicine, and many areas of engineering. The combination of these diverse areas of research promises to yield revolutionary advances in healthcare, medicine, and the life sciences through the creation of new and powerful tools that enable direct, sensitive, and rapid analysis of biological and chemical species. Devices based on nanowires have emerged as one of the most powerful and general platforms for ultrasensitive, direct electrical detection of biological and chemical species and for building functional interfaces to biological systems, including neurons. Here, we discuss representative ex amples of nanowire nanosensors for ultrasensitive detection of proteins and individual virus particles as well as recording, stimulation, and inhibition of neuronal signals in nanowire-neuron hybrid structures.

Since 1988, it has been demonstrated that metallic glasses can be made in bulk form with diameters larger than several millimeters. At present, several alloy systems with maximum diameters for glass formation exceeding 1 cm are known. As a result, Zr-, Ti-, Fe-, Co-, Ni-, and Cu-based bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) are already in use for magnetic-sensing, chemical, and structural applications. In this article, recently developed BMGs with critical diameters of more than 1 cm are summarized, and some of their industrial applications are reviewed.

A single printed circuit board includes thousands, sometimes even hundreds of thousands, of solder joints. The failure of even a single solder joint is usually enough to compromise the functionality of an electronic device or system. PbSn solder had been the standard ma te rial for these joints until various regulations around the world began to limit Pb use. SnAgCu and related alloys are quickly replacing PbSn, but much still needs to be understood and controlled. None of the paradigms for understanding the mechanical response of PbSn alloys is applicable to lead-free alloys. Much of the surprising behavior of SnAgCu solder arises from the complex and fascinating nature of its solidification behavior. In this ar ticle, the impact of solidification on the microstruc ture and therefore the mechanical properties of these solder joints will be addressed in the context of microelectronics proc essing. The need for better simulations of SnAgCu solder behavior will also be examined. Notably, modelers will have to account for a variety of new parameter dependencies not previously considered.

The following article is based on the Outstanding Young Investigator Award presentation given by Ju Li on April 19, 2006, at the Materials Research Society Spring Meeting in San Francisco. Li received the award “for his innovative work on the atomistic and first-principles modeling of nanoindentation and ideal strength in revealing the genesis of materials deformation and fracture.”

Defect nucleation plays a critical role in the mechanical behavior of materials, especially if the system size is reduced to the submicron scale. At the most fundamental level, defect nucleation is controlled by bond breaking and reformation events, driven typically by mechanical strain and electronegativity differences. For these processes, atomistic and first-principles calculations are uniquely suited to provide an unprecedented level of mechanistic detail. Several connecting threads incorporating notions in continuum mechanics and explicit knowledge of the interatomic energy landscape can be identified, such as homogeneous versus heterogeneous nucleation, cleavage versus shear-faulting tendencies, chemomechanical coupling, and the fact that defects are singularities at the continuum level but regularized at the atomic scale. Examples are chosen from nano-indentation, crack-tip processes, and grain-boundary processes. In addition to the capacity of simulations to identify candidate mechanisms, the computed athermal strength, activation energy, and activation volume can be compared quantitatively with experiments to define the fundamental properties of defects in solids.