John Mauro

Building on more than eighteen years of industrial research experience, Dr. Mauro uses a combination of theoretical and experimental approaches to address fundamental problems in glass science and engineering.

One key area of focus is the glass transition, which is known as one of the most challenging problems in condensed matter physics. It is also a problem of great technological importance, since the properties of a glass depend on its thermal history, and glasses spontaneously relax with heat treatment. This problem is especially critical for the high-tech glass industry, since glass transition/relaxation behavior is one of the most important properties for flat panel display substrates, optical fiber, and chemically strengthened glass. Hence, problems related to glass relaxation offer the opportunity to obtain solutions that both advance fundamental physical understanding and are directly applicable to practical problems of industrial concern. Dr. Mauro’s group uses a combination of modeling and experimental techniques to address key problems related to the thermodynamics and kinetics of glass transition and relaxation phenomena in inorganic glasses.

Another area of focus is predictive design of new glassy materials by “decoding the glass genome.” To be suitable for a particular application, a glass must meet stringent requirements for all properties of interest, including both product-related attributes and properties that are important for manufacturing. Optimization of the glass involves a careful balancing of the chemical composition to achieve these desired attributes. It is therefore critical to conduct fundamental research to develop a detailed understanding of the effects of composition and processing on material structure and its relationship to macroscopic properties. Dr. Mauro’s group addresses these issues through a combination of physics-based and empirical approaches, including novel statistical mechanical descriptions of glass structure and bonding, topological constraint theory, and machine learning techniques.

Other areas of focus include (a) high-strength glasses, with particular emphasis on chemically strengthened glasses, (b) nucleation/crystallization in glasses and glass-ceramics, and (c) glass melting and processing.