Indian-American scientist wins top award in glass science

NEW YORK: The Indian-American scientist, who first compared the movements of atoms in glass to the wiggling of jellyfish in water, has won the top award in the
field of glass science.
       
Himanshu Jain, director of the International Materials Institute for New Functionalities in Glass (IMI) at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, received the Otto Schott Research Award on July 2, at the International Congress on Glass in Strasbourg, France.
       
The biennial award, which carries a cash prize of USD 34,055 (25,000 Euros), is the most prestigious prize for glass research. Jain, a professor of materials science and
engineering at Lehigh, shares the award with Walter Kob of the University of Montpellier in France.
       
The citation described Jain's research as "outstanding work towards advancing fundamental understanding of the movements of atoms inside glass".
       
The Donors' Association for the Promotion of Science in Germany, which administers the Schott award, also noted with appreciation Jain's research into unique light-induced
phenomena in glass, his studies of the corrosion of glass in nuclear environments, and his work with sensors, infrared optics, waveguides, photolithography, nanolithography and
other photonic applications of glass.
       
Jain says he was taking a boat ride to the Isle of Skye off Scotland's west coast 20 years ago when he first conceived the idea of the connection between jellyfish and
atoms in glass.        

Watching the hundreds of jellyfish in the Sea of the Hebrides, Jain says he couldn't help noticing what many before had observed that the invertebrates were not swimming but
wiggling as they drifted in the water.
       
The fluctuations of the jellyfish caused him to wonder the movements of atoms in glass. When the temperature of glass is lowered to 4 degrees Kelvin, or near absolute zero, these atomic movements slow from a lively hop to a virtual standstill. When he returned from Scotland, he thought more deeply about the nuclear-spin relaxation studies he conducted with colleagues in Germany and the dielectric measurements of super-cold glass that his former adviser had reported.
       
"What we saw at this extremely low temperature was clearly something different," says Jain. "We proposed that a group of atoms was sitting in one place but wiggling like a
jellyfish, which does not swim but instead has small fluctuations of movement."
       
Jain initially called the phenomenon the "jellyfish" fluctuations for the AC (alternating current) conductivity of ionic solids at low frequency and low temperature. He later
coined the term "jellyfish fluctuations of atoms in solids."
       
Jain and his colleagues first measured the AC conductivity of atoms in super-cold glass over a long period of time, one second, an eon in the life of an atom. The group
then took the same measurements at room temperature over a much shorter period of time, about one one-billionth of a second, a snapshot of too short a duration for the atoms to begin their typical hopping movements.
       
In both instances under the low frequencies prevailing at low temperatures over a long duration and under the high microwave frequencies prevailing at room temperature over a short duration, Jain and his group at Lehigh discovered the same type of fluctuation of atoms. 

 "We noticed a ubiquitous phenomenon and came up with the idea that the fluctuation, or wiggling behavior, was the work of a group of atoms and not just that of one atom.
       
"For one atom to hop requires a lot of energy that is not available at 4 degrees K. On the other hand, for a group of atoms to wiggle does not require much energy. That small
amount of movement is sufficient to generate easily observable electrical conductivity," such as the occasional electric signal from super-cold glass.
       
Jain's jellyfish model, which has been validated in computer simulations, represents a fundamentally new perspective. It also has important applications, Jain says, to cell phones, satellites and other devices that contain glass and rely on microwave frequencies.
       
The Donors' Association also commended Jain for the breadth of his international collaborations. Jain has worked with engineers and scientists and even dentists in Germany, France, the Czech Republic, India, Ukraine, Japan, Greece, Portugal, Egypt, China, the UK and the US.
       
The Otto Schott Research Award has been presented since 1991, biennially and alternating with the Carl Zeiss Research Award, to recognize excellent scientific research and to encourage cooperation between science and industry. Both awards are administered by the Donors' Association for the Promotion of Science in Germany.
       
Prior to joining the faculty of Lehigh University in 1985, Jain worked as a researcher for six years at the Materials Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory and the Nuclear Waste Management Division of Brookhaven National Laboratory.