The atom probe was introduced at the 14th Field Emission Symposium in 1967 by Erwin Wilhelm Müller and J. A. Panitz. It combined a field ion microscope with a mass spectrometer having a single particle detection capability and, for the first time, an instrument could “... determine the nature of one single atom seen on a metal surface and selected from neighboring atoms at the discretion of the observer”.
A superalloy, or high-performance alloy, is an alloy with the ability to operate at a high fraction of its melting point. Key characteristics of a superalloy include mechanical strength, thermal creep deformation resistance, surface stability, and corrosion and oxidation resistance.
The Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, England was founded in the 1950s as the Department of Metallurgy, by William Hume-Rothery, who was a reader in Oxford's Department of Inorganic Chemistry. It is part of the university's Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division
George David William Smith FRS, FIMMM, FInstP, FRSC, CEng is a materials scientist with special interest in the study of the microstructure, composition and properties of engineering materials at the atomic level. He invented, together with Alfred Cerezo and Terry Godfrey, the Atom-Probe Tomograph in 1988.
John Werner Cahn was an American scientist and recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science. Born in Cologne, Weimar Germany, he was a professor in the department of metallurgy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1964 to 1978. From 1977, he held a position at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Cahn had a profound influence on the course of materials research during his career. One of the foremost authorities on thermodynamics, Cahn applied the basic laws of thermodynamics to describe and predict a wide range of physical phenomena.
Upadrasta Ramamurty is the President's Chair Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering & Materials Science and Engineering at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Prior to joining NTU, he was a professor in the Department of Materials Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India, from 2000 to 2018.
Budaraju Srinivasa Murty is an Indian metallurgical engineer. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest science award in India, for the year 2007 in engineering science category. From August 2019 he serves as the Director of Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, NIT Andhra Pradesh from 14 February 2024 and he was also director of IIIT Raichur till November 2024. Prior to that he was head of department at Indian Institute of Technology Madras and professor at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.
Aloke Paul is an Indian materials scientist and a professor at the Department of Materials Engineering of the Indian Institute of Science. Known for his studies on solid state diffusion, Paul is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest Indian science award, for his contributions to engineering sciences in 2017.
Rachel Clare Thomson is a professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Pro Vice Chancellor of Teaching at Loughborough University. She is known for her expertise in measuring and predicting the behaviour of materials for high temperature power generation, as well as the development of higher education and research programmes.
Catherine Mary Fiona Rae is a Professor of Superalloys in the Department of Materials at the University of Cambridge. Rae is the Director of the Rolls-Royce UTC in Cambridge. She is known for her expertise in electron microscopy and the behaviour of materials in aerospace applications.
Tresa M. Pollock is ALCOA Distinguished Professor of Materials at the Department of Materials, University of California, Santa Barbara. Pollock is internationally recognised in the development of new materials systems, including alloys, 3D characterisation of structure and properties, and development of integrated computation materials engineering.
Kevin J. Hemker is the Alonzo G. Decker Chair and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and holds joint appointments in the Departments of Materials Science & Engineering and Earth & Planetary Sciences.
Dan J. Thoma is an American metallurgist who is a Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the director of the Grainger Institute for Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Thoma is also a past President of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers (AIME). Thoma is well-known for his research on 3D printing technology, which he has carried out for over two decades.
Julie Mae Schoenung is an American materials scientist who is a professor at the University of California, Irvine. She is co-director for the University of California Toxic Substances Research and Teaching Program Lead Campus in Green Materials. Her research considers trimodal composites and green engineering. She was elected Fellow of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society in 2021.
Carol Anne Handwerker is an American materials scientist. She is the Reinhardt Schuhmann, Jr. Professor of Materials Engineering and Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University. She is a fellow of both The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society and the Materials Research Society.
David Dye is a Professor of Metallurgy at Imperial College London. Dye specialises in fatigue and micromechanics of aerospace and nuclear materials, mainly Ni/Co superalloys, titanium, TWIP steel, and Zirconium alloys.
Aluminium–scandium alloys (AlSc) are aluminum alloys that consist largely of aluminium (Al) and traces of scandium (Sc) as the main alloying elements. In principle, aluminium alloys strengthened with additions of scandium are very similar to traditional nickel-base superalloys in that both are strengthened by coherent, coarsening resistant precipitates with an ordered L12 structure. But Al–Sc alloys contain a much lower volume fraction of precipitates, and the inter-precipitate distance is much smaller than in their nickel-base counterparts. In both cases however, the coarsening resistant precipitates allow the alloys to retain their strength at high temperatures.
Dierk Raabe is a German materials scientist and researcher, who has contributed significantly to the field of materials science. He is a professor at RWTH Aachen University and director of the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research in Düsseldorf. He is the recipient of the 2004 Leibniz Prize, and the 2022 Acta Materialia's Gold Medal. He also received the honorary doctorate of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
In materials science, a precipitate-free zone (PFZ) refers to microscopic localized regions around grain boundaries that are free of precipitates. It is a common phenomenon that arises in polycrystalline materials where heterogeneous nucleation of precipitates is the dominant nucleation mechanism. This is because grain boundaries are high-energy surfaces that act as sinks for vacancies, causing regions adjacent to a grain boundary to be devoid of vacancies. As it is energetically favorable for heterogeneous nucleation to occur preferentially around defect-rich sites such as vacancies, nucleation of precipitates is impeded in the vacancy-free regions immediately adjacent to grain boundaries
Terence G. Langdon is a scientist and an academic. He is a Professor of Materials Science at the University of Southampton, and a Professor of Engineering Emeritus at the University of Southern California.
