Prof. James M LeBeau

Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering

Primary DLC

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

MIT Room: 8-203

Assistant

Julia Hollingsworth
jholling@mit.edu

Areas of Interest and Expertise

Ceramics
Electronic Materials
Energy Storage
Nanotechnology
Structural Materials
Surfaces
Interfaces
Ferroelectrics/Piezoelectrics (FE Memory, Transducers)
Structural Materials (Novel Metal Alloys)
Nanoscale/2D Materials
Quantum Properties (Qubits)
Failure Analysis (Failure Modes in Materials)
Informing Process Development (Thin Film Growth)
Machine Learning to Accelerate Characterization

Research Summary

LeBeau Group : As scaling continues to be a major drive of research, future developments rely upon electron microscopy to probe the nature of material properties. In the nano-regime, one must explore local atomic structure, chemical composition, and bonding with ultimate spatial resolution. Now that aberration corrected microscopes have blown past the Ångström in resolution, a new level of clarity is available for exploring next-generation materials.

Research interests focus on applying and developing transmission electron microscopy techniques to determine the atomic structure of material defects, thus providing insight into observed properties. This is of particular importance as electronic devices scale to ever vanishingly small dimensions, when the detailed arrangement of atoms at interfaces begins to critically influence material properties.

Recent Work