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GLASSES

The looks of a million-year-old polymer glass

Nature Materials volume 19, pages 1041–1042 (2020)Cite this article

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Polymeric glasses with significant thermodynamic and kinetic stability have been fabricated using physical vapour deposition, providing a mean to gather insight into the properties of glasses aged for millions of years.

While glasses have been produced by physical vapour deposition (PVD) for many years, only in the past decade have their remarkable thermodynamic and kinetic properties been revealed1. The ensuing, systematic effort by scientists and engineers to characterize such glasses has demonstrated that PVD offers a unique way of preparing ultra-stable materials, with properties that would be extraordinarily difficult to attain by traditional glass preparation or processing techniques2. Now, writing in Nature Materials, James A. Forrest and co-workers report the fabrication of ultra-stable glasses from polystyrene and polymethylmethacrylate molecules with degrees of polymerization ranging from 6 to 12 by adapting the PVD process that has been used successfully for small-molecule glasses3.

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Fig. 1: Ultra-stable polystyrene polymer glasses.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Juan J. de Pablo

  2. Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, USA

    Juan J. de Pablo

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  1. Juan J. de Pablo
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Correspondence to Juan J. de Pablo.

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de Pablo, J.J. The looks of a million-year-old polymer glass. Nat. Mater. 19, 1041–1042 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-020-00812-4

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