UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — When Katelyn Kirchner arrived at Penn State seven years ago as an undergraduate studying materials science and engineering, glass was for windows.
“I remember being in a first-year seminar class and my professor, Carlo Pantano, talked about a material that looks like a cotton ball except it’s borate glass that you can put in a bullet wound to clot blood and prevent critical blood loss,” Kirchner said. “When I was thinking of glass, I was thinking about windows, not advanced biomaterials.”
Kirchner, now a doctoral candidate at Penn State studying with John Mauro, the Dorothy Pate Enright Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, quickly learned glass is much more advanced than it may seem.
Her journey studying glass recently took her to Japan, where she spent seven months last year studying disordered silica thin films.
“Most materials have an ordered, crystalline atomic structure,” Kirchner said. “Glass is unique in that its atomic structure is disordered. It’s like if you threw a bunch of marbles on the ground — none of them would be lined up.”
Fluctuations in the atomic structure mean that each localized region can have different properties, Kirchner said.
Her work involves using statistics to quantity the probability of different types of structures forming. She uses this information to reveal how properties vary in different regions of a glass and how the material may change over time.
“There are a couple of challenges, though, with this statistical approach,” Kirchner said. “For validation, you want to actually visualize the structures you are predicting. And for that you need thin film materials.”
That’s what brought Kirchner to Sapporo, Japan. There, she conducted work on an experimental project synthesizing disordered thin films. Kirchner worked with Professor Madoka Ono at Hokkaido University on the project.
Kirchner said she hopes to use the data she collected in Japan to develop a computational framework to understand how fluctuations in these thin films could be manipulated to achieve desired properties in glassy materials.
Their work could someday improve our understanding of structural deviations in disordered thin films and redefine how we design microelectronics, semiconductors and solar cells, according to Kirchner.
“I loved Japan and the people who I met there,” Kirchner said. “I’m so thankful for those experiences. I highly recommend everyone to jump outside of their comfort zone and their boundaries to try new opportunities.”
In addition to her research, Kirchner said the experience in Japan provided valuable professional development. She has made new collaborators, not only in Japan, but in Germany and Brazil, which have led to additional opportunities.
“I’m originally from Pennsylvania, and I am forever grateful for my time at Penn State, but there is value in seeing how a different research group, or culture, runs,” she said. “I always knew I wanted to see new ways of practicing science and gain new perspectives of how others view questions in my field. That pursuit that has made me a stronger scientist and opened up my bubble.”
Kirchner, Mauro and Ono recently co-authored, with an international team of scientists, a review paper that serves as the first comprehensive look at the spatial and temporal fluctuations of bulk glass, focusing primarily on commercially relevant oxide glasses. Kirchner and Ono are now writing up their work about how such knowledge can be applied to the field of thin film disordered materials.
“Glass is a fairly unexplored field,” Kirchner said. “There are so many applications opening up in just the last five to 10 years. We are constantly developing new advantageous properties to expand the use of glass in new markets. It’s an exciting time to be a glass scientist and engineer.”