In the years 1928–1929, as a postdoctoral fellow at Manchester University in the laboratory of Sir Lawrence Bragg, Zachariasen began his studies on the physical structure of silicates.
In a paper published in 1963, he showed that C. G. Darwin's formula for the secondary extinction correction contained an error in the treatment of the polarization of the X-ray beams.
[8] In 1967 Zachariasen published a general theory of X-ray diffraction in crystals that gave more precise estimates for X-diffraction intensities.
[9] In 1968 he published a theory that took into account both extinction and the Borrmann effect for X-ray diffraction in mosaic crystals.
Allison, Williams, and Zachariasen took a number of canoeing vacations together, sometimes accompanied by Rudolph "Buddy" Thorness (1909–1969)[11] and perhaps one or two other men.
In 1974, Zachariasen retired from the University of Chicago and moved with his wife to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they purchased the first house they ever owned.
He continued to write scientific papers, often working with his friends Finley H. Ellinger and Robert A. Penneman, both from Los Alamos National Laboratory.
[12] In 1932 W. H. Zachariasen published "The Atomic Arrangement in Glass",[13] a classic article that greatly influenced material scientists of that era.
According to Professor Richard L. Lehman of Rutgers University, "Zachariasen considered the relative glass-forming ability of oxides and concluded that the ultimate condition for glass formation is that a substance can form extended three-dimensional networks lacking periodicity but with energy comparable with that of the corresponding crystal networks.
Overall, in spite of Zachariasen's mediocre prediction record, he has received great recognition as being the first to systematically address the relationship between atomic structure and glass forming ability.
are: According to Robert Penneman of Los Alamos National Laboratory, "No other crystallographer has done so much to expand our knowledge of heavy element chemistry, or had a such a central role in the development of atomic energy."
In 1928, just two years before Willie went to the University of Chicago, a national survey had ranked the department of physics number one in the country.
This was due in large part to the presence at that time of Michelson, Millikan,[16] and Compton, three Nobel Prize winners.
He immediately ended the domination of the department by Michelson's grating ruling engines by giving them away, one to Bausch and Lomb, and one to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.