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Glasses are hard, brittle materials, produced by high-temperature mixing followed by rapid cooling. Glasses have an amorphous atomic structure, and are usually made from a fused mixture of oxides, such as lime or silicon dioxide.
Ageing is a non-linear, irreversible process that defines many properties of glassy materials. Now, it is shown that the so-called material-time formalism can describe ageing in terms of equilibrium-like properties.
Controlling substrate elasticity during physical vapour deposition allows access to high-density stable glasses that would otherwise be formed under prohibitively slow deposition conditions on rigid substrates.
Power-law scaling of low-frequency vibrational density of states is widely observed in glassy materials, yet the value of scaling exponents remains controversial. Here, Xu et al. identify two scaling exponents by separating stable from unstable glass to reconcile the debate in the literature.
Little is known about how the states in glass are connected to each other. Here, the authors perform molecular dynamics simulation of relaxation in a prototypical metallic glass to show that the energy barriers separating these states are very low, and even be overcome by quantum fluctuations.
Ageing is a non-linear, irreversible process that defines many properties of glassy materials. Now, it is shown that the so-called material-time formalism can describe ageing in terms of equilibrium-like properties.
Processible centimetre-scale porous glasses using zeolitic imidazolate framework (ZIF) materials are developed, while fine-tuning of the processing conditions allows control of pore size and molecular sieving properties.
By removing water from crystalline molecular complexes, microporous metal–organic framework glasses are formed. The glasses can be obtained in monolithic shapes by melt-quenching.
Disordered systems that are far from equilibrium relax slowly towards their equilibrium. Now, we learn that the irreversible plastic deformations that form the wrinkles of a crumpled sheet result in a complex energy landscape that ages logarithmically.
Oxide glasses can be intrinsically toughened by forming crystal-like, medium-range order clusters, which transform inversely to the amorphous state under stress, exciting multiple shear bands for plastic deformation.
An experimental approach enables the observation of the microscopic details of the relaxation of a highly equilibrated glass back to the liquid phase in real time. This points to a scenario where devitrification proceeds via localized seeds separated by macroscopic length scales.