Biography
Michael Brown has made significant contributions to the fields of plasticity, creep, fatigue, and ductile fracture, introducing transformative ideas across these areas. His pioneering work includes the quantitative application of electron microscopy for measuring strain fields in precipitates and dislocations, as well as studying the energetics and growth kinetics of damage clusters in irradiated materials.
He played a pivotal role in developing high-resolution scanning microscopy and was instrumental in establishing the SuperSTEM laboratory at Daresbury, Cheshire, now an international centre for frontline analytical electron microscopy. He has most recently used concepts of self-organised criticality to calculate the stress required to produce a plastic strain in a ductile metal, and to show how that relates to the endurance limit in fatigue. His work has shaped the understanding of crystal deformation and inspired new alloying strategies to produce fatigue resistance in metals.
Research
Analytical electron microscopy, dislocation plasticity.
Publications
2024 L.M. Brown, The clash between chaos and symmetry in an ancient process: The working of metals. Oxford J. Symmetry & Asymmetry https://oxq.org.uk/papers
2024 L.M. Brown, Shock plasticity reconciled with uniform high-rate plasticity. J. Dyn. Behav. Mater (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40870-024-00431-z)
2020 L. Lea, L. Brown and A. Jardine, Time limited self-organised criticality in the high rate deformation of fcc metals. Communications Materials 1 93 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s43246-020-00090-2)
2019 L.M. Brown, Dislocation plasticity and the Cavendish Laboratory. CavMag 21 10-11
2018 L.M. Brown, Dislocation avalanches: An elegant analogy for metal deformation. Research Features 130 48-51
2016 L.M. Brown, Power laws in dislocation plasticity. Philos. Mag. 96 2696-2713 (https://doi.org/10.1080/14786435.2016.1211330)
Teaching and Supervisions
Professor Brown has given undergraduate lectures and supervisions on all subjects except particle physics. He has lectured and supervised graduate students in electron microscopy and solid state physics.
