• Materials Science ?
• CIMAT ?

Materials Science ?

The need for new materials has been a constant throughout history. From the plough to the space shuttle, from the mud hut to the earthquake resistant skyscraper, from the stone ax to the atomic bomb, human everyday life, transport, communication, housing and behaviour have been profoundly altered through the invention and discovery of new materials.

It is very seldom that a material can be used as given by nature. Usually, mining ore must be refined and processed to produce metals. Ceramics are produced by a delicate processing of raw materials. Careful synthesis is needed for the fabrication of most polymers. The manifold possibilities of combining known materials gives rise to composites.

On the other hand, there are many forces driving today the search for new materials: Materials designed to an end must perform a function, for a long time and without fail. They must be as easy and as cheap as possible to manufacture. The ensuing process must be as harmless to the environment as possible. Also, contemporary life has made us accustomed to global communications, more efficient transportation and longer life expectancy than ever before. To a large extent, this is based on the existence of objects such as the microchip, of strong and light metal alloys, and of bone implants. Is it possible for the benefits due to these advances to become more widespread than they are at present? The issues of cost and feasibility become important: Why is it so costly to refine copper? Is it possible to refine oil more efficiently? Is it possible to develop better, biocompatible bone implants?

Materials, as traditionally understood, are macroscopic objects. However, they are of course composed of atoms and molecules, and it is a distinctive feature of many materials that their collective behavior is completely different, as in magnetism, from what one would expect from the known behavior of the individual components. More recently, it has become possible to manufacture materials at the nanoscale, and they have been attracting increasing interest because of their enormous potential in materials design, as well as because of their interesting magnetic, optic, catalytic properties, and fascinating mechanical behavior.

CIMAT ?

There arises a need to understand, not just at a consumer end level, but also at a deeper scientific level the inner workings of materials. Why do materials respond to external forces in the way they do? Is it possible to manufacture materials with preassigned properties on a molecule by molecule basis ? More recently and on a different vein, improved experimental techniques have allowed a closer look at the fascinating field of granular materials such as sand and powders. On the other hand, many materials, such as bones, wood, sand, seashells, spiderwebs and biological membranes, are already given by nature and perform in particularly efficient ways that have found no parallel in the laboratory. Why is that so? There also arises a need for an improved understanding in scientific terms, of these materials.

Inserted in this reality, the "Center for Advanced Interdisciplinary Research in Materials", CIMAT, is an initiative that brings together Physicists, Engineers, Chemists and Biologists around six main scientific research subjects:

• Bioceramic Materials, such as bones, teeth, shells and seashells
• Materials Theory, Why do things break?
• Materials Far From Equilibrium, like a dam during an earthquake
• New Materials with Catalytic Properties, to manufacture polymers according to measure.
• New Magnetic Materials.

The Center's mission is to perform scientific research and graduate student training related to Materials Science at the highest level of excellence. It is meant to be a ten-year project, in which although there is a global perspective dictated by different applications, like the wish of having better bone and dental implants, lighter and resistant materials, oil and plastics production, and the development of information storage devices, in the short term the objectives are placed on the increase of scientific knowledge around the questions that appear concerning all these previous subjects.

It is a remarkable institution due to its interdisciplinary nature, the variety of topics studied and techniques involved, the quality of its membership and the available infrastructure: more than 1000 m2 in office space, conference rooms and laboratories with equipment to carry out parallel computation, photoelectron spectroscopy and electron spin resonance, scanning electron microscopy, atomic force and tunneling microscopy, x-ray diffraction, determination of magnetic susceptibility, analysis of rheological properties and material surfaces.