Christian Mailhiot

Materials Physics Department

Sandia National Laboratories Livermore, CA

Abstract

Materials are central to every aspects of global competitiveness and drive technological advances in energy, environment, global security, and human welfare. As a subset of the materials innovation enterprise, the establishment of a fundamental knowledge of the properties of materials in extreme environments underpins the optimization of the performance, safety, reliability, and sustainability of components and systems in end-use applications characterized by extreme operating conditions. Equally important to optimizing the performance of materials in extreme environments is our ability to use extreme conditions to design and synthesize novel materials with targeted properties.

In this presentation, we will illustrate the use of thermo-mechanical energy — in the form of high pressure and high temperature — to design and synthesize novel materials. The application of thermo-mechanical energy on an energy scale that is comparable to chemical bond energies in solids can advance the concept of “materials by design” in unique ways by converting molecular solids into novel 3D networks. This new field —barochemistry or high-energy density materials science — offers the ability to direct and control chemical bonding and solid-state reactions at the molecular, atomic and electronic levels by the application of thermo-mechanical energy comparable to that of chemical bond energies.  The ability to modify chemical bonding in molecular and condensed matter systems by means of high-pressure and high-temperature opens new opportunities to the synthesis of novel materials with unique properties desirable for energy applications.

The presentation will also describe a materials innovation infrastructure to shorten the materials discovery-development-deployment cycle by integrating theoretical and computational approaches, and experimental capabilities at scientific user facilities.

Finally, an overview of ongoing materials science programs and emerging research directions at Sandia National Laboratories will be presented

Biography

CHRISTIAN MAILHIOT is manager of the Materials Physics Department at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) in Livermore, CA.  Prior to joining SNL in 2016, he held the position of Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at Washington State University (WSU) during the period 2013 – 2016.  At WSU, he also held the positions of Director for the Center for Institutional Research Computing (CIRC), and Administrative Director for the Joint Center for Deployment and Research in Earth-Abundant Materials (JCDREAM). Dr. Mailhiot was a senior technical manager at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) during the period 1989 – 2013. He also held senior leadership positions at the Department of Energy in Washington, DC.  Dr. Mailhiot has made several scientific contributions to the areas of theoretical and computational condensed matter physics, ab initio many-body calculations of materials, atomic and electronic structure of materials, electronic structure theory and optical properties of semiconductor superlattices and synthetically modulated quantum-confined structures, semiconductor physics, surface and interface science, static and dynamic pressure-induced phase transformations. He received his B.Eng. in Engineering Physics in 1978 from L’École Polytechnique de Montréal in Canada. He obtained his M.S. (1980) and Ph.D. (1983) in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. From 1983 through 1989, he was a member of the technical staff at the Xerox Webster Research Center in Webster, NY, where he worked in the field of semiconductor and solid-state physics. In 2003, he was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society, Division of Materials Physics. He serves on numerous editorial boards and review and scientific advisory committees.