Professors C. Austin Angell, George H. Wolf, Stuart M. Lindsay, and Dr. William F. Oliver are supported by a grant from the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to study vitrification, viscous liquids, and the glass transition in the very high pressure regime. This research will elucidate the behavior of a variety of important chemical systems and materials when subjected to conditions of extreme pressure. The main thrust of this research concerns the extension of the study of liquid states and glass transition phenomenology to the very high pressure regime of 10 GPa where the product of the pressure and volume are comparable to the intermolecular potential. A combination of experimental techniques will be used to characterize such systems including the use of ultra-high contrast Brillouin scattering in conjunction with the use of a diamond anvil cell to maintain samples at ultra high pressures. A subsidiary thrust of the proposal is to explore the use of pressure-induced vitrification by destabilization of crystal lattices. Angell and co-workers conjecture that the pressure-induced vitrification phenomenon is a spinodal collapse similar in principle to that which terminates the liquid state at extreme negative pressures.
