UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #1056

Overall Research Project Description Fibrous materials are ubiquitous in our daily life as well as playing a critical role in scientific discoveries. Clothes, ropes, fish lines, to list but a few, are made of fibrous materials. Of biological relevance muscles, hair, collagen are all fibrous materials. The fundamental units of fibrous materials are often polymers that can be imagined as a string of small molecules connected by covalent bonds; and the microstructures determine their properties, e.g., their mechanical strength, optical behavior, etc. Diffraction is a powerful tool for resolving these microstructures: by shining an X-ray or neutron beam on a piece of fiber, packing of atoms can be resolved by analyzing its diffraction pattern (the tiny fiber can diffract X-ray or neutron, and the diffracted waves are registered by a 2D detector, forming a diffraction pattern). One of the most influential breakthroughs in science history, the determination of the famous double helix structure of DNA, is based on this principle.

The goal of this proposed project is to develop a user-friendly toolkit for the analysis of 2D diffraction data of fibrous materials. Although the theory of data analysis has matured, currently there is no efficient, easy-to-use, graphic user interface (GUI)-based software for the community: scientists rely on home-brewed codes that are often outdated and cannot take advantage of modern computation power. Inclusion of expertise in computer science (or engineering), and driven by the need for high-speed data reduction and analysis, this project is an ideal one of interdisciplinary nature. In the long term, we hope to promote research collaboration between computer scientists/engineers and materials scientists, chemical/biological engineers, chemists and physicists, etc.

We will use data collected at major national laboratories hosting neutron sources (Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) or National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)) and synchrotron X-ray sources (e.g., Argonne National Lab (ANL) or Brookhaven National Lab (BNL)). In particular, since FSU is one of the even partner universities of ORNL, the recruited students will be promoted to interact with ORNL scientists, and use their knowledge to solve real-world scientific and engineering problems.