IMREL-CHRNS Partnership for Research and Education in Materials (IC-PREM) using a National Facility

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Fayetteville State University (FSU) is a minority-serving institution with over 70% of students classified as minorities, primarily African Americans, and with high female, military or military-affiliated student populations. This award to FSU supports research on neutron scattering of nanomaterials through the NSF Partnerships for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) program. The established partnership is defined between the Interdisciplinary Materials Research and Education Laboratory (IMREL) at FSU funded by NSF, and the Center for High Resolution Neutron Scattering (CHRNS), a national user facility co-funded by NSF and by the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Center for Neutron Research (NCNR). The IMREL houses equipment and instrumentation for materials synthesis, fabrication, processing, characterization and property measurements for nanomaterials research, and CHRNS provides state-of-the-art neutron scattering instrumentation to the general scientific community with broad applications in materials research, such as polymers, metals, ceramics, magnetic materials, porous media, fluids and gels, and biological molecules. The FSU investigators and undergraduate students are supported to visit and conduct onsite collaborative research annually with CHRNS scientists on various synthesized nanomaterials using neutron scattering at CHRNS. FSU's facilities will also be made available to CHRNS-affiliated scientists and to the CHRNS user community for complementary research at FSU as needed. This IMREL-CHRNS PREM (IC-PREM) project will enhance the materials research capacities and promote the education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) at FSU. The national user facility CHRNS is utilized to enhance the minority education in this PREM project.The research focus in this project is to use the neutron scattering at CHRNS to understand the structure-processing-property relationship of nanomaterials. The IMREL and CHRNS investigators have identified research directions with mutual interests for synergistic collaborations in these three thrust areas: (1) tailoring one-dimensional inorganic perovskite nanofibers for enhanced physical and chemical properties; (2) optoelectronic properties of two-dimensional hybrid perovskites; and (3) synthesis, manipulation, and characterization of nanomaterial pseudocrystals. These fundamental research projects will explore new enhanced physical and chemical properties by delicately tailored inorganic nanoscale perovskite nanofiber architectures through changing the shape, dimensionality, size, processing and chemical doping; potentially find new optoelectronic properties of two-dimensional hybrid perovskites through the study of isotope effects, cation substitution, structural defects and structural dimensionality; and achieve enhanced electrical, optical and thermal properties through surface modifications with nanocrystals. Neutron scattering by the partner, CHRNS, is a centerpiece method to characterize these crystalline and magnetic nanostructures that cannot be done by other means to guide the investigations in each of the research areas.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.