Steve Feller Sabbatical Report 5 Athens February 22, 2016

What a glorious 10 days! I last wrote from Innsbruck where there was snow on the mountains and 50 oF, now it is 70 oF and sunny to perfection.

I'm visiting Dr. Stratos Kamitsos of the National Hellenic Research Foundation (NHRF). I visited him on sabbatical in the fall of 1990 and have been back an additional seven times, including this visit. This past week and today we have spent hours together discussed a half-dozen projects on borate and tellurite glasses. This will keep us busy at Coe for a long while. We will discuss lots more this week. With Stratos science is a personal event and we love to discuss, argue with each other for long periods. We are great friends as well. His hospitality is superb.

The National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens My grandson Leo, daughter Ray, and colleague Stratos Kamitsos at the NHRF. I'll come back to the science later. See the last page for some science details.

My daughter Rachel (Ray), husband Michael, and my two-year old grandson, Leo, visited us here for 6 days and we did a lot with them as well. Here I'll share some images of Athens and the area around it.We start at the historic center of Greece, the Acropolis which the Parthenon sits. My son in law is Michael and Barb and I complete the quintet. The famous Charyitide porch of the six women. Five of the originals are now in the new and great Acropolis Museum (images later) and one is in the British Museum ( a sore point for the Greek people).

At the foot of the Acropolis is the theater of Dionysus, This is the ancient theater of the great Greek playwrights such as Sophocles and Euripides. It is thought to be one of the oldest theaters in the world.

The Temple of Olympion Zeus in downtown Athens as shot from the Acropolis

In the distance is Mount Lycabettus, tallest point in Athens We went to the wonderful National Archeological Museum in downtown Athens. Here are a few images. First we have the desk mask of Agamemnon, capturer of Troy. It is gold and was found at Mycenae. Next is Cycladic art, 5000 years old. I like the style. Zeus or Poseidon follows, the jury is out as to who it is This is a must-see museum. I conclude the images here by showing you the Horse and Jockey and a closeup of the jockey: Had enough culture? Here are some island pictures, these are from Aegina from which the sea was named. Of course there was a temple there (makes an equilateral triangle with the Parthenon and Sounion)

There will be another report from Greece. Way too much to show all at once. But a few more words about the science. It is difficult financially to do science here. Yet Stratos and colleagues have done quite well. They have a great combination of ambition and brains. Stratos Kamitsos is a world expert in vibrational spectroscopy, IR and Raman. They also do some ionic conductivity, poling, ab initio and MD calculations, thermal measurements and more. There lab has grown a lot since I was first here in 1990 for three months on sabbatical. We've discussed a dozen papers of mutual interest and this has led to a growing list of joint projects, including studying tellurites (yes Brittney). I will give some details on this project to show how my scientific work goes.

At the institute here they have a theoretical chemistry group that does serious calculations of glass structure from quantum mechanical wavefunctions. With the groups at Univ of Warwick, Univ of Nottingham, and the Rutherford-Appleton lab, all in the UK, we found what's called a radial distribution function for glassy TeO2 which gives the number of atoms from a given atom as a function of distance. This was found using neutron scattering a few years ago on samples made at Coe by visiting graduate students. When I came to Athens I found they had calculated the same spectrum using the calculational approach but they had compared their result to less accurate results from a French group. With improved resolution I suggested they use our results instead. So I've contacted the groups in UK to ask them to send a digitized version of the neutron results here. The calculated structural results allowed the Athenians to calculate Raman and IR spectra which they also obtained experimentally on their samples of TeO2 (very tough to make ask Brittney!) as well as on glassy zinc tellurites. This may allow a refinement in the structure determined from the neutron scattering results since they know the origins of the vibrational spectra in terms of the calculated locations of the Te and O atoms (100 in total on 100 different energy minimized configurations of TeO2 alone) and so it goes...

More soon.

Steve or Doc