Organization

Integration and coordination within the Center will be approached from two perspectives – one driven by the research goals and the other driven by the thrust areas. The Office of the Director will ensure integration between activities and tasks that tie to the Center’s research goals. To visualize how our carefully organized and appropriately focused research plan drives integration, it is helpful to consider a high-level overview of the tasks associated with each research goal shown in the Figure below. 

The Temperature Extremes Goal and the Electron-Phonon Coupling Goal represent the forefront of thermal transport research. To make these tractable problems we limit our focus to defect free single crystals. Understanding these fundamental mechanisms is a required step towards accurately treating thermal transport under irradiation (the subject of our remaining research goals). 

The Impact of Defects on Thermal Transport Goal has an oxide and a nitride focus. For the oxide portion, we take a thorough approach by considering a broad spectrum of defects from point defects to large clusters. For the nitride portion, our focus is limited primarily to point defects. We take a similar approach with the Impact of Interfaces on Thermal Transport Goal, by considering defect clustering for oxide interfaces and limiting our focus for nitride interfaces. Meeting these goals will require close interaction and coordination between the computational and the experimental research teams. 

The research conducted within the Center represents coordinated achievements involving either input/output interconnections or critical prediction/validation interactions that has and will continue to result in impactful publications and review articles.