At the heart of Cherokee Farm will lay the UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Advanced Materials, a $45 million facility that will serve as a hub for nanotechnology and materials science and a link between Cherokee Farm and the unprecedented materials resources in East Tennessee.
ORNL is home to the Spallation Neutron Source, the world's most powerful pulsed neutron source and an unmatched tool to analyze materials on the smallest level possible. Work continues at the lab's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, the Department of Energy's first nanotechnology research center created to capitalize on the power of SNS.
These combined resources put Cherokee Farm in the middle of some of the most cutting-edge materials research taking place on the planet. Nanoscale studies allow biomedical researchers to get glimpses of the body's most fundamental building blocks, providing insight into how to design effectively targeted drugs. Materials study facilities allow for the creation of new materials, leading to innovations in fields from alternative energy to environmental science and the development of more energy-efficient building materials.
With connections to the world-leading high performance computing resources of UT and ORNL, Cherokee Farm will provide a central location for materials analysis, research and application.
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