The present trend of developing electronic devices with increasingly fine dimensions borders on a number of fundamental scientific questions about the very nature of how materials at ultrafine dimensions behave. This article addresses some of these questions. The fabrication of discrete metallic phases in porous and nonporous glassy matrices presents a number of exciting device possibilities. Methods of fabricating ultrafine metallic phases in silica via the sol-gel route are presented.

In attempting to fabricate materials with ultrafine physical dimensions for a wide variety of applications, several fundamental questions arise about the nature of materials behavior. For example, how many metal atoms are necessary to form a cluster exhibiting “metallic“ properties? Moreover, does the number of atoms necessary depend upon which metallic property is examined? This question has been partly addressed by D.C. Johnson and co-workers with regard to magnetism in osmium clusters. Their results show a threefold increase in magnetic susceptibility between clusters containing 3–10 osmium atoms.

Another important question, especially when considering device applications, is how the relative contributions of surface and bulk thermodynamics affect such properties as phase transformations. In addition, ultrafine phase dimensions interact with the fundamental unit lengths of a wide range of processes, including the wavelength of visible light, the mean free path lengths of conduction processes, the wavelengths of phonon vibrations, etc. How do these interactions affect optical, thermal, and electronic properties?

Fabrication of ultrafine metallic particles in porous and nonporous matrices may lead to many possible device applications including heterogeneous catalysts, nonlinear optic devices, highvoltage switching devices based on interparticle tunneling, and perhaps even new types of charge storage devices (capacitors).

I must support the judgment of the Materials Research Society in naming its principal award after von Hippel. His early work was on dielectrics, and that is the area in which my own introduction to materials science was made. In fact, I habitually claim that one of the inventors and fathers of the subject was E.B. Moullin, Reader in Electrical Engineering at Oxford and later Professor of Electrical Engineering at Cambridge. In 1933 he approached my chemistry tutor, Sidgwick, saying “I have this man Willis Jackson coming to do a D.Phil, with me. He knows how to measure dielectric loss. I think that if I can put a physical chemist to work alongside him we might make that cease to be just an engineering parameter to be measured and come to know what causes it—and then perhaps design new materials which are better.” Sidgwick nominated me as the physical chemist, and as far as I am concerned that is where the subject of materials science begins.

My subject is how you should display the statistics of orientations of polycrystals. For this subject I have several heroes from the past. They are Euler, of course, Rodrigues, Cayley and Klein. Of these the most unjustly neglected is Olinde Rodrigues, which is something I have only come to know in comparatively recent years. The whole subject is one to which I have returned on and off, learning a little more each time, since it was first put to me as a problem by C.G. Dunn just about 30 years ago.

Chaired by J. Murray Gibson (AT&T Bell Laboratories), S. Thomas Picraux (Sandia National Laboratories), and Barry E. Scheetz (Pennsylvania State University), the 1987 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston shattered several attendance records as it offered an unprecedented collection of leading-edge technical symposia and short courses. Activities began before the start of the technical symposia with a one-day short course on Conventional and High Temperature Superconductors on Sunday, November 29. The 20 technical symposia ran from Monday through Friday, November 30-December 4, and short courses continued through Saturday, December 5.

Rounding out the schedule were several additional events: the popular lunchtime Symposium X on Frontiers of Materials Research, a forum on Education in Materials Science and Engineering with an address by National Science Foundation director Erich Bloch, a workshop on Specimen Preparation for Transmission Electron Microscopy of Materials, the Plenary Address by William C. DeVries on “Medical and Materials Issues of the Total Artificial Heart” (to be published in an upcoming issue of the BULLETIN), and the Von Hippel Award lecture on “Orientation Mapping” given by the award's 1987 recipient, Sir Charles Frank (see p. 24 in this issue).

Total meeting attendance passed 3,500, making 1987 another year of record growth for MRS. Similarly, the number of short courses and shortcourse students rose over previous years, and the increasingly popular equipment exhibit overflowed to additional booths outside the main exhibit hall. One exhibit featured its own speaker, Yorick, a talking skeleton, from the Division of Mechanics and Materials Science, U.S. Food and Drug Administration Center for Devices and Radiological Health.