Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1518339
32 SMT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2024 find root cause and validate our solutions to ensure they have the intended result. Denney: at's just called "doing business." We use our MRP soware to manage the sup- ply chain and drive the assembly process to deliver to our customers. e harder part was managing demand expectations. How much of what was needed and when? is is largely in our customer's hands, and most people would stop there. But last-minute orders that take weeks to prepare for aren't rare, and nobody's happy about it. Not us, and certainly not our customers. We invited one customer to visit us and showed them our process for assembling their products. We were able to show them how long each product takes to prepare, and all the various steps involved in getting the subassem- blies ready for the final assembly. We then pro- posed using a shared online spreadsheet so that we could track their in-stock inventory, along with our "ready-to-ship" inventory. is pro- vided much greater visibility into each other's shops. We could easily see their demand, and they could easily see our supply. If we notice a sharp drop in their stock of any one prod- uct, we should make sure we're building more of that product. If they notice our ready-to- ship inventory is low, they can give us a heads- up that they will soon need more and that we should get ready. is smoothed out the whole process. No more surprises. No more over- building and holding inventory longer than we need to. We're happy, our customers are happy, and our suppliers are happy. I think Michael Scott would call that a win-win-win. SMT007 Mike Konrad is founder and CEO of Aqueous Technologies, and vice president of communi- cations for SMTA. To read past columns, click here. New research, conducted at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, illu- minates the strange behavior of gold when zapped with high-energy laser pulses. When certain materials, such as silicon, are sub- jected to intense laser excitation, they quickly fall apart. But gold does the opposite: it gets tougher and more resilient. This is because the way the gold atoms vibrate together—their phonon behav- ior—changes. "Our findings challenge previous understand- ings by showing that, under certain conditions, met- als like gold can become stronger rather than melt- ing when subjected to intense laser pulses," said Adrien Descamps, a researcher at Queen's Univer- sity Belfast who led the research while he was a graduate stu- dent at Stanford and SLAC. "This contrasts with semicon- ductors, which become unsta- ble and melt." For decades, simulations hinted at the possibility of this phenomenon, known as phonon hardening. Now, using SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), the researchers have finally brought this phonon hardening to light. The team published their results on Friday in Science Advances. In their experiment, the team targeted thin gold films with optical laser pulses at the Matter in Extreme Conditions experimental hutch, then used super-fast X-ray pulses from LCLS to take atomic- level snapshots of how the material responded. This high-resolution glimpse into the atomic world of gold allowed researchers to observe subtle changes and capture the moment when its phonon energies increased, providing concrete evidence of phonon hardening. They used X-ray diffraction at LCLS to measure the structural response of gold to laser exci- tation. This revealed insights into the atomic arrangements and stability under extreme conditions. (Source: SLAC) Researchers Capture Strange Behavior of Laser-excited Gold