Materials Science and Technology

New work from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Bowling Green State University and other international partners using hydrogen to improve the potential of gallium oxide as a high-power device material that would transform power electronics, leading to drastic decreases in the energy consumption, cost, size and weight of our everyday devices.

Emphasizing the synergy between materials synthesis, processing, properties, and performance

Materials Science and Technology (MST) serves the nation by providing world-leading, innovative, and agile materials science and technology solutions for national security missions. We deliver core materials science, technology, and hardware essential to ensure weapons materials performance.  MST integrates the understanding across materials synthesis, processing, properties, and performance to benefit all endeavors from research to development to component manufacturing.  We apply fundamental materials expertise to a range of national security needs including nuclear energy, nonproliferation, and global threat reduction. 

We anticipate the advent of a new era in materials science, where we will transition from observing and exploiting the properties of materials to a science-based capability that creates materials with properties optimized for specific functions.  As such:

MST’s Mission: to ensure performance, safety, reliability and security of materials of importance to the nation through excellent science.  We deliver innovative and rapid solutions to meet fundamental materials science, stockpile, energy and global security needs.  We apply a multidisciplinary approach to push the state-of-the-art in materials science to be responsive to emergent national security requirements, trusted stakeholders, and production agency needs.

MST’s Vision: Lead the nation in providing applied material solutions for national security problems.

To enable our mission and work towards achieving our vision, MST is comprised of three materials focused research groups: Engineered Materials (MST-7), Materials Science in Radiation and Dynamics Extremes (MST-8), and Nuclear Materials Science (MST-16).