Dr. Xiaoxing Xia
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Seminar Information
In person only
Historically, new materials are developed slowly and steadily through the discovery of new elements and the ever-increasing control of their composition and microstructure at the atomic and molecular level. Recent advancement in additive manufacturing opens up a new paradigm where novel properties and break-through performance are enabled by rational design of the materials architecture across multiple length scales.
In this talk, I will first introduce the concept of architected materials — structures with mesoscale, microscale and even nanoscale components designed into particular spatial arrangements, in which the additional architectural degree of freedom encodes properties that differ from or surpass those of their constituent materials. Architected materials can be designed to dynamically respond to various forms of stimuli, challenging the conventional perception that materials are stagnant once the components are manufactured [1]. In particular, we have used two-photon 3D printing to create reconfigurable architected materials that undergo controlled, programmable, and non-volatile structural transformations in response to an electrochemically driven silicon-lithium alloying reaction [2]. This novel framework of designing, fabricating, and predicting dynamic architected materials could inspire new pathways towards smart, multifunctional materials in the future.
Second, I will discuss how to translate the additive manufacturing and architectural design expertise into functional devices with high performance and robust manufacturability. Towards this goal, we have demonstrated 3D printing of miniaturized ion traps with a deep, harmonic trapping potential and a high trap frequency for scalable quantum information processing [3]. The high trap frequency reduces anomalous heating and error rates of the trapped ion qubits, increases the ion operation and computation speed, and drastically simplifies the ion cooling protocol for future quantum computers.
Finally, I will briefly cover our on-going work on pushing the limits of the two-photon 3D printing technology to achieve higher throughput via massive parallelization.
References:
[1] Xia, X., Spadaccini, C.M. & Greer, J.R. Responsive materials architected in space and time. Nature Reviews Materials 7, 683-701 (2022)
[2] Xia, X. et al. Electrochemically reconfigurable architected materials. Nature 573, 205–213 (2019).
[3] Xu, S., Xia, X. et al. 3D-printed micro linear Paul trap for scalable quantum information processing. Submitted (2023)
Xiaoxing Xia is a staff scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA. He leads projects in developing next generation two-photon 3D printing technologies to achieve higher throughput, finer resolution, and multi-materials printing capability. His team utilizes a suite of additive manufacturing technologies for applications in responsive and architected materials, energy storage, carbon recycling, microfluidics, quantum computing, and inertial confinement fusion. He received his PhD in Materials Science from California Institute of Technology and BA in Physics from University of Chicago.