Dielectric and infrared reflectance studies of inorganic oxide glasses

In the first part of this thesis, two new spectroscopic methods were developed. Time domain reflectometric (TDR) and a high frequency sampling bridge technique, when combined with an AC transformer bridge allowed for the first time to obtain continuous dielectric data acquistion for inorganic glasses from 100 Hz to 2 GHz. Due to the availability of information at higher and lower frequencies, the two new techniques were tested on amorphous sodium trisilicate. After the trisilicate glass, all three dielectric techniques were applied to a series of lithium fluoroborate glasses. The temperature range for all three methods was 25 to 300{dollar}spcirc{dollar}C. Thus from all these experiments, DC conductivities and activation energies were determined. The borate system allowed for compositional properties to be investigated.; The second part of this thesis involved the structural investigation of sodium trisilicate and ternary borate glasses using infrared reflectance spectroscopy. The spectroscopic data was used to verify previous work on similar glass systems. The infrared studies showed the existence of a B-F bond in the ternary borates, agreeing with previous studies. In addition, the reflectance data underwent Kramers-Kronig transformation in order to obtain the optical and dielectric constants.; The third part of this thesis combines data fro the three dielectric techniques and the transformed infrared reflectance. The two separate regions seemed to join smoothly, although there was a void of data throughout the gigahertz region. To join the two separate dielectric regions, the damped harmonic oscillator (DHO) description was used. The parameters necessary for the model were obtained from the imaginary permittivity and the fit was applied to the real part of the permittivity. Qualitatively, the DHO seemed to join the two separate regions quite well.