Prof. Vinci comments for Science News

Rick Vinci, the P.C. Rossin Assistant Professor of materials science and engineering, was quoted in an article titled "A Hard Little Lesson" that ran March 29 in Science News.

The article described the results of experiments performed by researchers from the University of Minnesota and Los Alamos National Laboratory, which determined that nanospheres of silicon are as much as four times as hard as the bulk silicon used to make silicon wafers.

Vinci, an expert in the micro-mechanical behavior of materials, said the research "does a good job of extending our understanding of material behavior to a size range that has not been well studied before." Because the number of atoms in a nanosphere approaches the number that can be included in a computer simulation, he added, researchers may soon be able to make predictions of a material's behavior based on computer models.

Science News has a circulation of 159,000 and is published weekly in Washington, D.C.