Presidential Young Investigators Award

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This award is to provide research support to Dr. Westmoreland under the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Awards (PYIA) Program. The objectives of the PYIA Program are to provide support to the Nation's most outstanding and promising young science and engineering faculty. The awards are intended to improve the capability of U.S. academic institutions to respond to the demand for highly qualified science and engineering personnel for academic and industrial research and teaching. Dr. Westmoreland's field of research is the study of chemical reactions ranging from the plasma fabrication of microelectronic devices to combustion and pyrolysis. He plans to combine molecular-beam mass spectrometry (MBMS) with optical spectroscopy, gas chromatography, and GC/MS to map concentrations within laboratory reactors. This combination permits quantitative measurements both of reactive species (free radicals, singlet species like silicon dihydride, and ions) and of stable species. Plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) of amorphous silicon films from silane will be studied in an MBMS apparatus. A near-term goal is describing the existing commercial PECVD of amorphous silicon: hydrogen, silicon dioxide, and silicon-nitrogen films with sufficient accuracy for process and product-quality control, but understanding at a molecular scale will also be later directed toward new films and applications. His goals in combustion and pyrolysis are to establish and apply detailed chemical mechanisms of oxidation and growth, particularly the formation of aromatics. He will study three carbon hydrocarbons (propane, propene, propyne, and propadiene) to determine whether three carbon radicals form benzene, whether the benzene is formed via four carbon radical pathways, and whether molecular or insertion reactions might also be involved.