MRI: Development of a Nanoscale Absolute Dilatometer

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This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant provides resources to develop and install an ultraprecision absolute dilatometer and necessary supporting equipment at the Center for Precision Metrology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The dilatometer will be able to make length measurements of a variety of samples with nanometer accuracy. This will provide the capability of nanostrain measurements of material properties such as dimensional stability, thermal expansion, electrostriction and magnetostriction.A wide variety of products with critical dimensions, forms, and surfaces that have tolerances in the nanometer domain are of rapidly increasing commercial importance. At the same time that tolerance and feature size are becoming smaller, the overall scale of these products has remained fixed or increased. Where it had previously been sufficient to know properties such as creep, dimensional stability, thermal expansion, magnetostriction and electrostriction at the level of parts per million, current and proposed meso- and micro-scale products demand such understanding at the part per billion level. The instrumentation supported by this grant will enhance understanding of such properties and provide engineering data for the design of next generation precision systems such as semiconductor lithography machines. The facilities developed with support from this grant will also provide the means to train both graduate and undergraduate students in modern ultraprecision measurement methods.