"Scientist wins award for research on glass atom-jellyfish link"

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...

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...