A tiny silicon chip — the glowing orange square at the center of this special heating device — is heated to a temperature well below silicon’s melting point, and then very slowly cooled down. The chip inside this heating device was placed in the path of a synchrotron beam to probe its changes at a molecular level as it went through the retrograde melting process.

A wafer of silicon, which is the most widely used material for computer chips and solar cells.

Postdoctoral fellow Bonna Newman PhD ’08 and Tonio Buonassisi, the SMA Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Manufacturing, discuss their work studying the retrograde melting property of silicon.