Laurence D. Marks

Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA

Corrosion is a pervasive phenomeon, which despite decades of study is still not well understood at the nanoscale. While water is itself corrosive, when chloride ions are present many protective oxide films break down. Understanding this is critical for both applications in salt water and in-vivo, since both have high levels of chloride. After a general introduction, this talk will focus on the effect of chloride. I will show using density functional calculations that the dominant effect is an anisotropic change in the surface energy. The theoretical analysis is then combined with experimental TEM and APT studies which corroborate with the theoretical results.