Indian wins award for glass science research

New York, July 9: Mr Himanshu Jain, who first compared the fluctuations of atoms and of jellyfish, has received the world's top prize for glass science research.

The scientist compared the movements of atoms in glass to the wiggling of jellyfish in water, according to a news release made available yesterday.

Mr Jain, director at the International Materials Institute for New Functionalities in Glass at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, in neighbouring 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 25,000 euros, is the most valuable prize for glass research. Mr Jain, a professor of materials science and engineering at Lehigh, is sharing the award with Walter Kob of the University of Montpellier in France.

Mr Jain is being cited for ''outstanding work towards advancing fundamental understanding of the movements of atoms inside glass.'' The Indian-American is a professor of materials science and engineering and director of the International Materials Institute for New Functionalities in Glass at Lehigh University.

Before joining the faculty of Lehigh University in 1985, Mr 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. During this period he also taught a graduate course on ceramics at Columbia University in New York and served as a Visiting Scientist at University Dortmund, Germany and Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

At Lehigh, he introduced new courses on Dielectrics, Glasses, and Biomaterials.

Mr Jain has edited three books and is a co-author of two patents and numerous research papers. He is a recipient of Humboldt and Campbell Fellowships. He maintains active collaborations with several institutions in Germany, Greece, India and the US. This goes well with him as he enjoys visiting new places in his spare time.

Lehigh's International Materials Institute for New Functionalities in Glass is supported by a grant from the US National Science Foundation.

The Donors' Association for the Promotion of Science in Germany, which administers the Schott award, also noted 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.

Mr Jain was taking a boat ride to the Isle of Skye off Scotland's west coast 20 years ago, when he first conceived of the connection between jellyfish and atoms in glass.

Watching the hundreds of jellyfish in the Sea of the Hebrides, Mr Jain 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 Mr Jain to wonder anew at the movements of atoms in glass. When the temperature of a glass is lowered to 4 degrees Kelvin, or near absolute zero, he says, these atomic movements slow from a lively hop to a virtual standstill.

When he returned from Scotland, Mr Jain thought more deeply about the nuclear-spin relaxation studies that he had conducted with colleagues in Germany and the dielectric measurements of supercold glass that his former adviser had recently reported. Observing the supercold glass in the lab, he detected a weak signal with novel characteristics, indicating that some atomic movement was still occurring.

''What we saw at this extremely low temperature was clearly something different,'' says Mr 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.'' Mr 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.'' His theory met with resistance but has since gained acceptance and is described today in some textbooks on materials and their behaviours.

The Donors' Association also commended Mr Jain for the breadth of his international collaborations. Mr 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 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.

The award is named after Friedrich Otto Schott (1851-1935), a German chemist who invented borosilicate glass, which is known for its high tolerance to heat, chemicals and sudden temperature changes.

UNI