Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Glass is an incredibly useful material for many purposes, not least of which is as a tool to transmit and manipulate light. Such applications include lenses, display screens, and fiber optics for communications. In such realistic settings, it is necessary to understand and control how the glass-light interaction will be modified by the inevitable environmental perturbations, including heat, pressure, and so forth. This program seeks to explore, model, and predict these interactions, by combining glass synthesis with advanced characterization tools and theoretical approaches. In particular, our research and others suggest that pairs of electrons, termed "lone pairs", attached to certain atoms like tin or lead, have an extraordinary effect on directing the structure of the glassy material, and, possibly, also determining the way in which various perturbations affect the optical performance of the glass. Our program will investigate this idea carefully, first by studying well-defined crystal systems that can be shown to have lone pairs, and correlating the lone pair response to the optical response. We will then study glassy systems, which are much more difficult because of their disorder, but at the same time, much more relevant technologically. Ultimately, our work should prove important technologically as a way to design various optical responses, taking advantage of the lone pair response. Our trainees in this program will be exposed to an array of state-of-the-art experimental and theoretical methods, and will be well-positioned to enter the work force and contribute to the Canadian economy.