Glasses and Amorphous Oxides
Silicate (and many other!) liquids form glasses when they are cooled rapidly enough to avoid crystallization. Glasses are important materials in nature (glassy lavas; volcanic "ash") and in a wide range of technologies. They also represent the structure of the liquid itself, at the temperature of the glass transition. Amorphous oxide materials can also be produced by other routes, such as by chemical vapor deposition or ion beam assisted sputtering, and have a wide range of applications. For all of these materials, traditional diffraction methods give only very limited information. Spectroscopies such as NMR can provide quantitative structural data about the local chemical environments of many of their constituents.
Current Projects
- Aluminosilicate Glass Structure
- Borosilicate Glass Structure
- Pressure effects on glass and melt structure
- Insulating coatings for microelectronics
- Amorphous metal oxides for optical coatings
