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Nature Materials 7, 842–843 (1 November 2008) | doi:10.1038/nmat2311

Glasses: When disorder helps

Giancarlo Ruocco

Amorphous solids such as glasses are defined by the lack of long-range structural order that gives rise to a complex phenomenology in their vibrational properties. The thermal motion of atoms and molecules in these glasses cannot be simply described in terms of the wave-like oscillations known to solid-state physicists as phonons.