The University of Tennessee’s Cherokee Farm campus provides the location where private and public experts and researchers can commingle in an environment geared toward creativity, interaction, and innovation.
The Joint Institute for Advanced Materials is a University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge National Laboratory partnership, anchoring Cherokee Farm. It will serve as a hub for nanotechnology and materials science.
Whether exploring the human body’s most fundamental building blocks to better deliver medicine or developing new materials to better convert sunlight into electricity, UT, ORNL and private industry scientists and researchers at Cherokee Farm have the finest resources at hand.
The Spallation Neutron Source and Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are two of the finest such facilities in the field.
What is spallation?
When a fast particle, such as a high-energy proton, bombards a heavy atomic nucleus, some neutrons are "spalled," or knocked out, in a nuclear reaction called spallation. Other neutrons are "boiled off" as the bombarded nucleus heats up. It's something like throwing a baseball at a bucket of balls, resulting in a few being immediately ejected and many more bouncing around and falling out.
Illustration and text excerpted from ORNL Neutron Sciences website