Josef W. Zwanziger

Josef W. Zwanziger grew up in Ellensburg, Washington, and studied at the University of Chicago (BA Chemistry ‘83), Cornell University (PhD Chemistry ‘88, with Professor Ed Grant) and UC-Berkeley (PDF with Professor Alex Pines). He joined the faculty at Indiana University in 1990, rising to the rank of Professor, before moving to Dalhousie University in 2003. At Dalhousie he holds the Canada Research Chair in NMR Studies of Materials. His interests have always included a strong mix of theory and experimentation in chemical physics. His graduate work focused on the dynamic Jahn-Teller effect and its relation to geometric phases in quantum mechanics. As a post-doctoral fellow he developed solid-state NMR methods, and continued to study geometric descriptions of quantum evolution. At Indiana, his interests turned more strongly to materials, and his lab focused on glass structure, using a variety of spectroscopic and scattering methods.

Since moving to Dalhousie he has investigated also the optical performance of glass and its relation to structure and composition, while simultaneously developing a strong effort in first-principles studies of solids. He has been a senior editor at the Journal of Physical Chemistry, and also editor of the Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids. From 2011-2014 he was department chair of Chemistry at Dalhousie, and is currently the director of the Dalhousie Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Research Resource. He has been recognized with the 2019 Darshana and Arun Varshneya Frontiers in Glass Science Lecture award, the 2018 EWR Steacie Award of the Canadian Society for Chemistry, and the 2017 John C. Polanyi Award of the Canadian Society for Chemistry.

Title:  The Interaction between Stress, Light, and Chemistry in Glass

Abstract:  I review our progress in understanding the chemical basis for the stress-optic and photoelastic response of glass. By correlating the basic chemical bonding motifs in glass formers, glass modifiers, and their stress-optic response, we were able to develop a simple predictive design rule for how glass chemistry drives photoelastic response. In simple cases, like silicates, it is straightforward to apply, while in more complex systems like borates and tellurites, more detail about short range order needs to be supplied. On-going work will be briefly mentioned, including our efforts to understand the wavelength dispersion of the photoelastic response and the relation of the underlying structure to the individual photoelastic tensor elements.