Brent Fultz received his undergraduate degree from MIT, and his Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley in 1982. He was a Presidential Young Investigator, he received an IBM Faculty Development Award, a Jacob Wallenberg Scholarship, and the TMS EMPMD Distinguished Scientist Award of 2010. He consulted for an electronics testing company, Everett Charles Technologies, for the Defense Science Board, was a member of the Science Advisory Board of Actium Materials, and is now on the Science Board of Contour Energy. Fultz has authored or co-authored over 300 publications. With his friend, Prof. J. Howe of Univ. Virginia, he published a graduate-level textbook on diffraction and microscopy of materials (now in its 3rd edition). Brent Fultz was the Principal Investigator of the ARCS spectrometer project at the Spallation Neutron Source, now complete and in its operations phase. Scientific computing offers new opportunities for elevating the sophistication of neutron scattering experiments. Brent Fultz was the Principal Investigator of the software project Distributed Data Analysis for Neutron Scattering Experiments, DANSE , which focused on how computing can elevate the science of neutron scattering.

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One topic of Fultz's research is how atom vibrations in solids affect the entropy and thermodynamic stability of materials -- a review article is available here (4.5 MB). In the late 1980s, vibrational entropy was new to materials science, and its importance was unexpected when Fultz's group started work on this topic. Many studies of today involve measuring phonon spectra of materials by inelastic neutron scattering, and identifying the reasons for differences in vibrational entropy of different materials. Inelastic neutron scattering is also sensitive to magnetic and electronic excitations in solids, and several cases were found where these make major thermodynamic contributions. Sometimes it is possible to determine experimentally the partition function of the solid, from which all its thermodynamic properties can be derived. Recent work has focused on high-temperature behavior, where phonons interact with other phonons and with electronic excitations. With high-resolution inelastic x-ray scattering, Fultz's group has been studying how vibrational thermodynamics is altered when the material is under megabar pressures in a diamond anvil cell.

The global "energy problem" is of paramount societal importance, but the ultimate technical solutions are unknown. Research on energy-storage materials can help. For many years Fultz's group has worked on materials that store lithium (used in rechargeable batteries), and on materials that store hydrogen. One effort is focused on understanding the interactions of hydrogen molecules with surfaces, with the goal of learning how to optimize the hydrogen-storage potential of new materials that store hydrogen by adsorption interactions. For lithium-storage materials, one effort is to use the temperature variation of the battery voltage to understand how the electrode materials have changed over time, and to optimize the life of rechargeable batteries. The goal is to use a fundamental quantity, entropy, for practical service. More about our approach is here.

Brief descriptions of recent research results are given in the Fultz Group site.