Ames Laboratory, operated by Iowa State University for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), was established in 1947 to conduct basic research with particular emphasis on new materials.

Like the other national laboratories, Ames Laboratory was created in consequence of contributions made to the Manhattan Project. It was in Ames, early in World War II, that two college professors and a group of graduate students resolved a problem that had proved intractable to industry. Within months of Pearl Harbor, Frank Spedding and Harley Wilhelm devised a practical method for the large-scale production of pure uranium. While teaching industry how to do it, Ames furnished 1,000 tons of uranium for the Manhattan Project.

In the postwar years, processes were developed at Ames Laboratory for the production of metals such thorium, vanadium, and chromium that were considered exotic at the time. The processes were adopted by industry and most are still in use today.

Based on Spedding's earlier research, a pilot plant was built at Ames that produced 100-pound batches of the 15 rare earth elements in unprecedented purity. To tap a research source of 15 new metals, for these elements were hardly known before, would have been a triumph; but because each one in this family of the “fraternal fifteen” differs from its neighbor by a single electron, the research prospect revealed was virtually unbounded.

The Advanced Materials Institute (AMI) is the materials research arm of the Colorado Advanced Technology Institute (CATI), a state agency created in 1983 by the state General Assembly as an economic development initiative involving academic, industry, and government sectors. AMI represents a unique process in academic research: long-term materials needs of industry members are addressed by university investigators, with federal agencies providing the major source of funding.

AMI is a consortium of four research universities (Colorado School of Mines as the lead institution, Colorado State University, and the Universities of Colorado and Denver) and a present industrial membership of nine corporations (AMAX Inc., Adolph Coors Company, Digital Equipment Corporation, Gates Company, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Manville, Martin Marietta, and Telectronics). The Institute is governed by a Board of Directors with representatives from each participating organization. Sustaining memberships, which do not include representation on the Board, are available; memberships of both kinds are open to non-Colorado-based companies.

The long-term materials needs of industry members provide AMI's research agenda; many items, once identified, become company-shared interests. Requests for proposals, based on the agenda, are distributed to the affiliated universities for competitive awarding of seed funds. Proposals receive peer review and the Board selects those to be funded.

The growth of materials at interfaces frequently leads to patterns with length scales that can be much larger than atomic sizes. Patterns resulting from morphological instabilities occur during crystal growth and are responsible for the intricate shapes of snowflakes, dendritic crystals, and the like. They also occur during the electrochemical deposition of metals on surfaces, and during the growth of thin films by vapor deposition. Our purpose is to point out some particularly interesting connections that have come to be appreciated during the past five years between different types of pattern-forming phenomena, and to summarize some recent theoretical approaches to understanding them.

The phenomenon of dendritic crystal growth, though studied for many years, is still a great challenge. As an example, we show the development of a needle crystal of ammonium bromide (NH4Br) from supersaturated aqueous solution in Figure 1. The contours are cross sections of the interface at 20-second intervals, obtained by digital image analysis. One can see that an approximately parabolic tip translates at constant speed, and that the needle crystal is apparently unstable to the development of a train of sidebranches that propagate outward from the main stem but do not move forward with the tip.

The 1987 Spring Meeting of the Materials Research Society will be held Tuesday-Saturday, April 21-25,1987 at the Marriott Hotel and Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim, California. The meeting will feature 13 topical symposia, 21 short courses, an equipment exhibit, and a job placement center. Please review the program and register in advance using the registration forms in this issue of the MRS BULLETIN.

Preregistration is strongly encouraged to speed check-in at the meeting. Deadline for preregistration is April 1, 1987. All late registrations will be charged at-meeting registration fees.

The new Ion Beam Materials Laboratory (IBML) is a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) resource devoted to the characterization and modification of surfaces through the use of ion beams. IBML was developed and designed in response to a large number of recognized research needs ranging from archaeology to the Strategic Defense Initiative and from basic research to semiconductor development. Most recently, the IBML has been used in research on high temperature superconductors. The IBML was dedicated in February 1987 when the 3 MV tandem accelerator reached operational status.

Beginning with an existing accelerator facility built to support nuclear physics, Los Alamos researchers added materials science capability and started to demonstrate the power of ion beam techniques as they apply to many of the Laboratory's research activities. These efforts led to a growing interest in ion beams by fellow researchers and caught the attention of LANL management. By the fall of 1984, a clear grassroots case—which was supported by the Laboratory's Center for Materials Science (CMS)—was made for developing a modern ion beam facility, which included capabilities for materials modification and analysis. The $1.7-million IBML was funded with Laboratory-wide resources in the spring of 1985 and was charged with supporting Laboratory-wide programs.