October 7, 2024

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Materials World Network

The Materials World Network Universities

In order to study the Mixed Glass Former Effect, a Materials World Network has been formed. This MWN will use new modalities of international collaboration to provide students new educational experiences to broaden and deepen their research abilities and to expand and develop their professional and international awareness to enhance their global citizenry. A new MWN will be formed to enable our students to develop fundamental understanding of the MGFE across targeted glass forming systems and in doing so gain experience and skill in conducting research through international collaboration. This collaboration will provide our students with educational experiences in scientific communication, in traveling to and working with researchers around the world, in designing experiments to conduct research across multiple research groups, in presenting and defending their research results to their peers, in using this feedback to advance their understanding of science, and in integrating the results from the different research groups to form detailed models of the MGFE.

The international collaboration includes six universities total: Iowa State University, Central Michigan University, Cornell University, Ilmenau (Germany), Munster (Germany), and Chalmers (Sweden). Between the six universities they will investigate the MGFE through IR and Raman Spectroscopy, NMR Spectroscopy, neutron diffraction, x-ray diffraction, modeling (simulation molecular dynamics and reverse Monte Carlo), and finally dielectric
spectrometry.

By providing international collaborative education and research experiences to our students we will investigate the fundamental origins of the MGFE that appears to occur for nearly all glasses studied to date. There has been no dedicated research activity that seeks to explore the broad common features of the MGFE to develop a deeper understanding of the fundamental aspect of this effect in materials systems. The study will combine experimental measurements of the MGFE in ionic conductivity and tracer diffusion with measurements of the short and intermediate range structure of the MGF glasses with the computational modeling and simulation of the cation dynamics and static glass structures. These data sets will be combined across the MWN to enable the first ever detailed understanding of the MGFE in inorganic glasses. Such understanding may lead the way to enhancing the application of ionic glasses in electrochemical applications such as lithium batteries.