Manufacturing and Application of Next Generation Chalcogenides

Glass has been a key material for many important advances in civilization; it was glass lenses which allowed microscopes to see bacteria for the first time and telescopes which revealed the planets and the moons of Jupiter. Glassware itself has contributed to the development of chemical, biological and cultural progress for thousands of years. The transformation of society with glass continues in modern times; as strands of glass optical fibres transform the internet and how we communicate. Today, glasses have moved beyond transparent materials, and through ongoing research have become active advanced and functional materials.

Unlike conventional glasses made from silica or sand, research is now producing glasses from materials such as sulphur, which yields an unusual, yellow orange glass with incredibly varied properties. This next generation of speciality glasses are noted for their functionality and their ability to respond to optical, electrical and thermal stimuli. These glasses have the ability to switch, bend, self-organize and darken when exposed to light, they can even conduct electricity. They transmit light in the infra-red, which ordinary glass blocks and the properties of these glasses can even change, when strong light is incident upon them.

The demand for speciality glass is growing and these advanced materials are of national importance for the UK. Our businesses that produce and process materials have a turnover of around £170 billion per annum; represent 15% of the country's GDP and have exports valued at £50 billion. With our proposed research programme we will produce extremely pure, highly functional glasses, unique to the world. The aims of our proposed research are as follows:

- To establish the UK as a world-leading speciality glass research and manufacturing facility

- To discovery new and optimize existing glass compositions, particularly in glasses made with sulphur

- To develop links with UK industry and help them to exploit these new glass materials

- To demonstrate important new electronic, telecommunication, switching devices from these glasses

- To partner other UK Universities to explore new and emerging applications of speciality glass

To achieve these goals we bring together a world-class, UK team of physicists, chemists, engineers and computer scientists from Southampton, Exeter, Oxford, Cambridge and Heriot-Watt Universities. We are partners with over 15 UK companies who will use these materials in their products or contribute to new ways of manufacturing them. This proposal therefore provides a unique opportunity to underpin a substantial national programme in speciality-glass manufacture, research and development.

The University staff working on this project will work closely with industry, therefore they will develop research and professional skills relevant to the employment sectors of our partners. Similarly, as our industrial sponsors have already identified, your PhD students "will also be of interest to us as we continue to recruit for development of our products" (see Seagate Letter of Support).
The impact of our research on our Nation will be primarily directed to wealth creation. By accelerating our manufacturing capabilities in advanced materials will be strengthen our ability to innovate and create new products thereby increasing our competitiveness in a global economy. While historically, our country's strength was in the manufacturing of "classical" materials, it is now clear that the value added in the manufacturing of innovative and highly functional materials with significant added value will be the key enabler for growth, both in annual turnover and in diversity of products we produce and export.

The products that we will enable will also influence the Nation's health and culture. Chalcogenides have now been successfully trialled as electronic memory, by both Samsung and Nokia, in next-generation mobile phones and this technology is ready to replace conventional FLASH memory as it approaches its fundamental scaling limits. We are critically dependent on memory in computers, mobile phones and hand held devices therefore these materials will become a part of our everyday life through the work lead by Exeter in this project, supported by Samsung and Seagate. Chalcogenide optical components have for decades been used by UK aerospace and defence industries and will continue to do so; evidence for this is the strong defence and aerospace support our project has attracted. In telecoms, there is growing interest in nonlinear optical devices based on chalcogenides. In our Oxford lead work, we will develop switches and routers from chalcogenide materials. Similarly, the waveguide and microfluidic devices we will fabricate could find use in medical diagnostics and Heriot-Watt will prototype these devices.

Our Advisory Board includes representation from the Technology Strategy Board (Myrddin Jones, Lead Technologist for Electronics, Photonics, Electrical Systems) who provide links to national and local government agencies and the commercial private sector who will benefit from the research. Similarly, Dr John Lincoln as Network Manager for the Southeast Photonics Network has direct contact with the companies with which our consortium should partner. John will be responsible for developing new industrial partnerships and securing industrially-funded PhD projects throughout the lifetime of our project.

This proposal will address the fact that there is no UK producer of commercial chalcogenide glass or infrared transmitting optical fibres. UK industries that rely on these materials and products must source from the USA or Europe. The need for a coordinated national programme in chalcogenides is evidence-based, as verified by the range of industrial partners which support this proposal. We will begin distribution of chalcogenides produced at Southampton within the first months of the project therefore the impact of our material manufacturing will be immediate. Through the follow-on funding with industry we plan, the impact will also continue after this project is complete.

Finally, it is our intention to use the opportunity that this proposal provides to underpin a National programme in chalcogenide-glass manufacture, research and development. Although the consortium formally consists of five of the leading Universities in the country who work with chalcogenides, there are others and it is our intention to also engage with them through complementary projects and future proposals.