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 also received
an IBM Faculty Development Award and a Jacob Wallenberg Scholarship.
He consulted for an electronics testing company, Everett Charles Technologies,
for the Defense Science Board, and was a member of the Science Advisory
Board of Actium Materials. 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 is the Principal Investigator of the software project Distributed Data Analysis for Neutron Scattering Experiments, DANSE , which is focused on new science by neutron scattering.
Return
to Brent Fultz Home Page
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One topic
of Fultz's research is how atom vibrations in solids affect the entropy
and thermodynamic stability of materials. Vibrational entropy was new
to materials science, and its importance was unexpected. Fultz's group
is measuring phonon spectra of materials by inelastic neutron scattering,
and learning the reasons for differences in vibrational entropy of different
alloy phases. Inelastic neutron scattering is sensitive to magnetic
and electronic excitations in solids, and several cases were found where
these make major thermodynamic contributions to the entropy of solids.
In some cases 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 the excitations of phonons interact with other phonons and with thermal electron excitations.
The promise of neutron scattering led Fultz into the the ARCS project, and then into the DANSE software project that emphasizes new types of neutron science with the assistance of
modern scientific computing.
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.
Brief descriptions
of recent research results are given in the Fultz
Group site.
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