| AVS 62nd International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Actinides and Rare Earths Focus Topic | Wednesday Sessions |
| Session AC+AS+MI-WeA |
| Session: | Chemistry and Physics of the Actinides and Rare Earths |
| Presenter: | Albert Migliori, Los Alamos National Laboratory |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
The speeds of sound, or, equivalently, the elastic moduli are some of the most fundamental attributes of a solid, connecting to fundamental physics, metallurgy, non-destructive testing, and more. With modern advances in electronics and analysis, changes in elastic moduli are detectable at 100 parts per billion, providing new and important insight into grand challenges in plutonium science. Applied to 239Pu, the effects of aging are measured in real time as a function of temperature, and the temperature dependence of the elastic moduli of gallium stabilized delta plutonium leads to important questions about the validity of electronic structure theory, and points towards inescapable constraints on any theory of this metal.
This work was supported as part of the Materials Science of Actinides, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences under Award # DE-SC0001089.