Richard Gleiter Research Paper

HERBERT GlEITER

INTRODUCTION

Herbert Gleiter was born on 13th October 1938 in Stuttgart. He studied Mechanical engineering and physics at Technical University of Stuttgart. He graduated as an engineer in the year 1965. He received his PhD in the year 1996 from the same university. For the next 3 years he worked as a research fellow at Harvard University Cambridge, USA. From the year 1973 to 1994 he was the professor and director of Institute of Materials science, University of Saarland, Germany. Meanwhile in the year 1987 He was the Senior member and the founding Director of the Institute of New Materials. In the year 1988 He was awarded the Leibniz prize by the German national science foundation. In the year 1993 He was awarded the Max Planck

In the year 1981 itself he formulated research vision and also produced experimental as well as theoretical results. He shaped the vision of National Nanotechnology Initiative in the US. In 1959 at Cal Tech, Richard Feyman spoke to highlight the tremendous scientific and technological potential of materials at atomic or molecular dimensions. Almost twenty years later Herbert Gleiter focused on the benefits of ultrafine grains in solids and named it as nanostructured solid.

In the late 70’s Herbert Gleiter’s research opened the way to a new area of materials science by synthesizing a new class of solids named Nanocrystalline Solids. A Nanocrystalline solid differs a lot when compared with the same solid but in larger crystal form. Example : Nanocrystalline Silicon can provide efficient light emission while Bulk Silicon cannot.

Nanocrystalline solids are polycrystals i.e, the crystal size of these are typically 1 to 10 nanometers. Solids consisting primarily of internal interfaces represent a separate class of atomic structures. Nanocrystalline solids are very important for us because of the following four

2. Even though some of the crystals have same chemical composition when compared with Nanocrystalline solids, These solids differ a lot in properties ( in some cases by several orders of magnitude). This suggests that they may be utilized technologically in the future.

3. Nanocrystalline solids even permit the alloying of immiscible components.

4. If small droplets of diameter up to the order of 1 – 10 nm with a glassy structure are consolidated ( Made solid, hard or compact), a new type of glass is obtained. These glasses are called Nanoglasses.

Nanoglasses are a new class of Nanocrystalline solids. These glasses differ form normal glasses in their microstructure that resembles the microstructure of polycrystals. They consists of regions which contains melt-quenched (Heating a solid and then sudden cooling) glassy structure. The atomic structure and density of Nanoglasses can be tuned by varying the spacing between the glass/glass interfaces as well as the time-temperature history of