Achievement

Cindy Byer has completed her Departmental Qualifying Examination, and is now working on her first formal scientific presentation at a conference (the SEM conference in Albuquerque in June 2009). She has made significant progress in understanding the microscale experimental techniques in this field. Specifically, she has been working on understanding the scale dependence of the mechanical properties of magnesium single crystals by using microcompression experiments (earlier experiments have shown strong scale-dependence of mechanical properties in single crystals of gold). With her group she has performed several experiments, and obtained measurements of the elastic response and plastic behavior of c-axis oriented single crystals that are about 10 microns in diameter. The elastic response appears to be the same as the bulk response at these size scales. The plastic response has not been fully analyzed yet.