Teeth: From Materials Science to Dentistry and Evolutionary Biology
By Brian Lawn, a retired materials scientist and NIST Fellow
As a happily retired materials scientist from NIST, I have continued a long-standing interest in how materials deform and fracture under high stress. My research began in the 1960s with fundamental investigations into the way intrinsically brittle solids can sustain highly concentrated stresses beneath hard contacts. (An everyday example of such a contact is a round pellet fired from a BB gun at a windowpane.) Later, my focus turned to studying materials in a broad range of small-scale technological applications, such as semiconductor chips, electronic sensors, optical lenses and multilayered films. In these small-scale devices, contact with a single errant particle on an otherwise pristine surface can reduce mechanical strength by several hundreds of times, which in turn can lead to premature catastrophic device failure.
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