Statistical Thermodynamics for Nano-Crystalline Materials

New advanced nano-crystalline materials are the key to technological progress and a focus of intensive research activity during last decades. An attractive class of "advanced materials" are the intermetallic compounds and systems produced on their base as thin layer structures. Over several past decades nano-thin film materials on the base of transition metals such as iron silicides or FePt-compounds attracted a world-wide interest due to their strong magnetic properties and high anisotropy associated with the chemical ordering in the structure. These materials found an extensive application in industry in the production of microelectronic and optoelectronic devices and they are also extremely important for modern computer technologies. One of the problems encountered in design and fabrication of new technological materials is to control the processes occurring in the structure under different treatment conditions. To control, for example, crystallization and growth of new phase, recrystallization and recovery, creep, fatigue, rupture, wetting, magnetization, resistivity and etc., a profound basic knowledge of order-disorder phenomena and generation of point defects in the structure of materials is of paramount importance. The knowledge of the defect types and their structure, formation and migration properties in intermetallics is very fragmentary or often completely lacking due to experimental difficulties in the preparation of patterns of good quality and sufficient purity. Furthermore, such experimental methods are very complex, time consuming and expensive. Very often even an experiment alone cannot solve the problem because of numerous possibilities of point defect structures and migration properties in intermetallics. Thus many of the essential thermodynamic data for compounds of industrial interest are missing and still not available. Additionally, an interpretation of ordering phenomena in the structure of many such important and advanced materials as nano-crystalline thin intermetallic films, on the base of currently developed models is still deficient, insufficient and quite contradictory for design of new material systems. It is therefore, the main goal of the presented Project to develop a quantitative, predictive and verifiable theory for description of ordering phenomena in intermetallics and nano-crystalline thin film intermetallic materials.

New advanced nano-crystalline materials are the key to technological progress and a focus of intensive research activity during last decades. An attractive class of "advanced materials" are the intermetallic compounds and systems produced on their base as thin layer structures. Over several past decades nano-thin film materials on the base of transition metals such as iron silicides or FePt-compounds attracted a world-wide interest due to their strong magnetic properties and high anisotropy associated with the chemical ordering in the structure. These materials found an extensive application in industry in the production of microelectronic and optoelectronic devices and they are also extremely important for modern computer technologies. One of the problems encountered in design and fabrication of new technological materials is to control the processes occurring in the structure under different treatment conditions. To control, for example, crystallization and growth of new phase, recrystallization and recovery, creep, fatigue, rupture, wetting, magnetization, resistivity and etc., a profound basic knowledge of order-disorder phenomena and generation of point defects in the structure of materials is of paramount importance. The knowledge of the defect types and their structure, formation and migration properties in intermetallics is very fragmentary or often completely lacking due to experimental difficulties in the preparation of patterns of good quality and sufficient purity. Furthermore, such experimental methods are very complex, time consuming and expensive. Very often even an experiment alone cannot solve the problem because of numerous possibilities of point defect structures and migration properties in intermetallics. Thus many of the essential thermodynamic data for compounds of industrial interest are missing and still not available. Additionally, an interpretation of ordering phenomena in the structure of many such important and advanced materials as nano-crystalline thin intermetallic films, on the base of currently developed models is still deficient, insufficient and quite contradictory for design of new material systems. It is therefore, the main goal of the presented Project to develop a quantitative, predictive and verifiable theory for description of ordering phenomena in intermetallics and nano-crystalline thin film intermetallic materials.