RUI: Coe College Undergraduate Research Program in Glass Science

Coe College, Cedar Rapids IA

Investigators

Abstract

NON-TECHNICAL: Over the next year this project includes an ambitious and balanced mixture of basic and applied research on oxide glasses. Glass has been described as the universal solvent and as such allows itself to be made from many compounds. This research includes the formation of new glasses and the property and structural characterizations that reveal the material's potential usefulness in applications such as batteries, nuclear storage, particle physics detectors, and antibacterial biological uses. Within the field of glass science, the Coe College group has expertise in forming glasses by a number of important novel syntheses. The work is being undertaken with nine Coe College undergraduates and their students through their NSF-REU site. The key broader impact is the development of undergraduate students into professional scientists. The Coe College undergraduate training model includes multiple years of research for each student. It is this sustained research that motivates students to continue to graduate schools at a rate of 75% per year. Over 40% of Coe students are first generation college-bound with 33% of them being from low-income families (with less than 150% of the federally-defined poverty level). There are a number of other broader impacts including outreach to grade schools, extensive leadership, training, and experiences within the glass and physics communities, and involvement of high-school students and teachers in this research. TECHNICAL: During 2013, this research includes the study of new oxide glasses prepared by novel pathways including roller quenching, laser levitation, and a solution method of glass formation. The research focuses on the determination of the glass?s physical properties, and relating these properties to the spectroscopically-determined atomic structure. The proposed research activities are divided into four main areas: 1. Preparation and study of important and novel glasses and their uses; 2. Intermediate range order (5 to 10 atom clusters) studies of glasses using 10B nuclear magnetic resonance, neutron scattering, molecular dynamics simulations of atomic structure, and time of flight mass spectroscopy; 3. Preparation of new glasses for calorimeters for future hadron collider experiments at the CERN lab; and 4. Study of a thermodynamic anomaly found at low alkali oxide contents in glasses. Within each activity there are a number of sub-projects consisting of both in-house work and research with a set of domestic and international collaborators. Glass is amongst the most practical of materials and the glasses studied are promising candidates for high energy storage batteries, nuclear waste incorporation, high-energy physics detectors, and biological/medical uses. An important aspect of the work is the substantial high-level research training of a large number of undergraduates (twelve in 2013, including nine supported directly by this project and three from Coe College's REU site). Many of these students are first generation college students.