Department of Chemistry
Research Associate Professor, Departmental Crystallographer
Privat Dozent, Univ. Cologne, Germany
(Physical Crystallography, Ph.D., Univ. of Cologne, 1990)
(206) 543-7585
kaminsky@chem.washington.edu
The research is aiming at the correlation between atomic structure and observed optical properties.
New chiral substances are synthesized as models for structure-feature studies, for example from adding chiral ligands to Isothyocyanates. These new substances crystallize well and allow a multitude of variations of their chemistry while being strongly structurally related.
Similarly, structural phase-transitions cause variations in structures which are the cause of sometimes strong changes of the optical properties.
New optical measurement techniques are developed to collect data on chiroptical properties like optical rotation, Faraday Effect, circular dichroism, the electro-optic effect, and electrogyration. Such new methods are: 1) the 'tilter - method' that allows to measure optical rotation in any transparent crystal, 2) an imaging polarized microscope which allows simultaneous precision measurement of linear dichroism, retardation and extinction angles of heterogeneous samples, 3) a microscope which is designed to image circular extinction in solids, U-pol, 4) millipol, a microscope to measure time-dependent changes of the optical indicatrix on a millisecond timescale.
Semi-empirical models are developed to be applied to the visible spectral range of light which allow calculating electrogyration, the electro-optic effect and the d-coefficients for frequency doubling, using the atomic structure and empirical polarizability volumes for the individual atoms.
Crystal growth from aqueous or other solutions and their crystallographic characterization (forms, structure, and basic physical properties) assist the research. The aim is to provide large samples of interesting chemical composition in the size-range of cube-centimeters.
X-ray structure determination and chemical analysis as part of the duties for the Department of Chemistry in Seattle complement these studies.
I devoted some of my time to the development of software packages to aid the teaching of physical crystallography. This resulted in one program for the presentation of tensorial features in form of representation surfaces (WinTensor for Win95/98/NT/2000/XP) and another program for the presentation of crystal morphology as virtual reality models (WinXMorph for Win95/98/NT/2000/XP).
"Reinvestigation of electrogyration in triglycine sulphate." W. Kaminsky, Phase Transitions 52, 235-259,(1994)
"Measurement of optical rotation in crystals." W. Kaminsky, A. M.Glazer, Ferroelectrics 183, 133-141,(1996)
"A new optical imaging system for birefringent media." A. M.Glazer, J. G.Lewis, W.Kaminsky J. Royal Soc. London A452, 2751-2765, (1996)
"Crystal optics of Mannitol, C6H14O6: Crystal growth, structure, basic physical properties, birefringence, optical activity, Faraday effect, electro-optic related effect and model calculations." W. Kaminsky, A. M. Glazer, Z. Kristallogr. 212, 283-296,(1997)
"Determination of optical activity in monoclinic tartaric acid, (2R, 3R)-(+)-C4H6O6, using the 'tilter'-method." D. Mucha K. Stadnicka, W. Kaminsky and A. M. Glazer, J. Phys. C: Condens. Matter 9, 10829-10842, (1997)
"Images of absolute retardance L×Dn, using the rotating polariser method." M. A. Geday, W. Kaminsky, J. G. Lewis, A. M. Glazer, J. of Microscopy 198, 1-9, (2000) Click here to download a reprint of this article
"Experimental and phenomenological aspects of circular birefringence and related properties in transparent crystals." W. Kaminsky, REVIEW Rep. Prog. Phys. 63, 1575-1640, (2000) Click here to download a reprint of this article