Biography
Levi Holler is a third year undergrad in the Nuclear Engineering Bs/Ms Program at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Levi primarily helps the group by performing Raman Spectroscopy, which is used to analyze the structure, phase, and defects of materials of interest in the group. Levi’s research focuses on investigating the effects of doping on radiation induced redox effects of cerium dioxide. Cerium dioxide acts as a non-radioactive surrogate for uranium dioxide due to its similar fluorite lattice structure. Cerium dioxide has been shown to produce lattice swelling and heterogenous microstrain when exposed to swift heavy ion irradiation. The proposed reason for this swelling is radiation induced redox effects.The cerium cation goes from 4+ to 3+ due to the highly ionizing radiation with the larger 3+ cerium cation causing unit cell expansion and heterogenous microstrain. To combat this issue one possible suppression method involves doping of CeO2 with dopants that make it energetically unfavorable for Ce(IV) to transition to Ce(III). To test this method of suppression Levi analyzes the doped ceria using Raman spectroscopy and X Ray diffraction analysis to see how certain dopants create defect structures or help to mitigate radiation induced redox effects in CeO2
