Glass is an extraordinarily versatile material and ubiquitous in our society. While the majority of world-wide production focuses on windows and containers, there is a growing demand for improved specialty glasses that have become vital to a large range of technological applications. The majority of specialty glass compositions are based on silica mixed with specific elements to engineer desired properties. Despite this importance, a complete theory of the physical processes responsible for the properties of glasses and glass transition remains one of the top unsolved problems in materials science. Contributing to this problem is the paucity of quantitative details about structural order and disorder in glass---yet all of the macroscopic properties of a glass are a direct result of its underlying structure.<br/><br/>A great advantage of solid-state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is its ability to reveal and quantify atomic-level structure in materials where diffraction techniques fail. This is especially true in non-crystalline solids, where diffraction methods rarely reveal structural details beyond the first-coordination sphere except in the simplest of compositions. While it also true that the spectra of non-crystalline solids in many spectroscopies are often broad and featureless, magnetic resonance spectroscopy has a unique advantage in that the different NMR frequency contributions leading to these broadenings can be separated and correlated in multi-dimensional experiments. In this talk I will describe efforts in our group to develop multi-dimensional multi-nuclear NMR spectroscopic methods and analyses that provide new levels of detail about structure in silicate glasses. These results reveal unexpected structural correlations and challenge commonly accepted structural models for silicate glass structure.

Measuring correlated structural distributions in non-crystalline materials with solid-state NMR spectroscopy

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.