Glasses articles within Nature Materials

Featured

  • Article |

    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.

    • Peng Luo
    • , Sarah E. Wolf
    •  & Zahra Fakhraai

  • News & Views |

    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.

    • Georgia R. F. Orton
    •  & Neil R. Champness

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Porosity of zeolitic imidazolate frameworks can be preserved beyond glass transition and melt processing. Here centimetre-scale porous glasses are demonstrated, whereas liquid processing enables fine-tuning of the size of the gas-transporting channels for molecular sieving.

    • Oksana Smirnova
    • , Seungtaik Hwang
    •  & Alexander Knebel

  • Letter |

    Oxidation normally deteriorates the mechanical properties of metals. But it is now shown that the formation of a percolating oxide network in metallic glass nanotubes can result in an unprecedented superelasticity of 14% at room temperature.

    • Fucheng Li
    • , Zhibo Zhang
    •  & Yong Yang

  • News & Views |

    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.

    • Hewei Zhao
    •  & Lin Guo

  • Article |

    Through the approach of paracrystallization under high-pressure and high-temperature conditions, exceptional toughening has been achieved in oxide glasses by enhancing their crystal-like medium-range order structure. This discovery offers possibilities for the design of more resilient glass materials.

    • Hu Tang
    • , Yong Cheng
    •  & Tomoo Katsura

  • News & Views |

    An ultra-microporous metal–organic framework glass foam shows outstanding gas sieving properties for challenging gas mixtures.

    • Chinmoy Das
    •  & Sebastian Henke

  • Letter |

    The existence of fast dynamics in glass solids at low temperatures is attributed to liquid-like atoms that are inherited from high-temperature liquids and exhibit behaviour similar to that of atoms in liquid states.

    • C. Chang
    • , H. P. Zhang
    •  & H. Y. Bai

  • News & Views |

    Plastic yielding of metallic glasses is mediated by strain softening, which promotes localized failure and impairs engineering predictability. Unravelling the mechanisms associated with this plastic flow behaviour lays the groundwork for reliable engineering design of this elusive material.

    • Marios D. Demetriou

  • News & Views |

    Glass-forming ability in metallic systems is related to the diversity of atomic packing schemes quenched into the glassy state, which manifests itself in the width of the first broad X-ray diffraction peak. This provides a swift way for screening libraries of deposited alloy films and searching for good glass formers.

    • Simon Pauly

  • Article |

    The liquid nature of hard glasses is demonstrated by broadband stress relaxation experiments. The rheology and dynamic transition of various glass systems can be unified by a universal scaling law in the time–stress–temperature–volume domain.

    • Shuangxi Song
    • , Fan Zhu
    •  & Mingwei Chen

  • Article |

    Submicrometre-sized amorphous silicon samples show an unusually large tensile strength relative to the compressive strength, which is due to the reduced shear modulus and the activation energy barrier for shear transformations under compression.

    • Yuecun Wang
    • , Jun Ding
    •  & Zhiwei Shan

  • Article |

    Charged colloidal systems undergo fast crystallization under deep supercooling due to a coupled mechanism involving the discrete advancement of the crystal growth front and defect repair inside the recently formed solid phase.

    • Qiong Gao
    • , Jingdong Ai
    •  & Peng Tan

  • Perspective |

    Highly ordered crystalline porous solids are useful for many applications. This Perspective explores the evolution of these systems from the ordered state to the glassy and liquid states, discusses the different types of porous liquid and considers possible applications of these disordered systems.

    • Thomas D. Bennett
    • , François-Xavier Coudert
    •  & Andrew I. Cooper

  • News & Views |

    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.

    • Juan J. de Pablo

  • Article |

    Lithium metal is considered an ideal anode for high-energy rechargeable lithium batteries, but understanding its nucleation and growth at the nanoscale remains challenging. Using cryogenic transmission electron microscopy and simulations, a structural and morphological evolution scenario for Li deposits is proposed.

    • Xuefeng Wang
    • , Gorakh Pawar
    •  & Boryann Liaw

  • Article |

    The physical vapour deposition of ultrastable monodispersed polymer glasses is reported. This technique allows for the high tunability of glass transition temperatures of the deposited polymers, which could be useful for technological applications.

    • Adam N. Raegen
    • , Junjie Yin
    •  & James A. Forrest

  • Article |

    The rotational dynamics of self-propelled microparticles suspended in a colloidal glass is sharply increased at the glass transition of the system while their translation diffusion is strongly hindered.

    • Celia Lozano
    • , Juan Ruben Gomez-Solano
    •  & Clemens Bechinger

  • News & Views |

    Monatomic glassy antimony can now be achieved via melt-quenching in a nanoconfined volume in a device setting. In contrast to alloys currently used in phase-change memories, deviation from optimized composition is no longer an issue in this simple material.

    • Wei Zhang
    •  & Evan Ma

  • News & Views |

    Scaling of the phonon damping with the wavevector in glasses is found to be different from the traditionally assumed Rayleigh scattering, and related to surprising, long-range correlations in the local elasticity matrix.

    • Jeppe C. Dyre

  • Article |

    Studies of the phonon damping mechanism in glasses reveal scaling with the wavevector k which is different from the traditionally assumed Rayleigh scattering. These findings are related to long-range correlations in the local stress.

    • Simon Gelin
    • , Hajime Tanaka
    •  & Anaël Lemaître

  • Commentary |

    Twenty years ago, the 'phonon-glass, electron-crystal' concept changed thinking in thermoelectric materials research, resulting in new high-performance materials and an increased focus on controlling structure and chemical bonding to minimize irreversible heat transport in crystals.

    • Matt Beekman
    • , Donald T. Morelli
    •  & George S. Nolas

  • News & Views |

    Thermal cycling of a metallic glass to cryogenic temperatures has been found to cause atomic-scale structural rejuvenation.

    • Todd C. Hufnagel

  • Editorial |

    Understanding the behaviour of metallic glasses requires answers to complex scientific questions, which are also critical for their successful commercialization.

  • Interview |

    There have been a number of attempts to commercialize bulk metallic glass over the past 20 years. William L. Johnson, the Mettler Professor of Materials Science at California Institute of Technology, has been a prominent figure in these efforts and gives Nature Materials his perspective on the topic.

    • John Plummer

  • Commentary |

    It has long been thought impossible for pure metals to form stable glasses. Recent work supports earlier evidence of glass formation in pure metals, shows the potential for devices based on rapid glass–crystal phase change, and highlights the lack of an adequate theory for fast crystal growth.

    • A. Lindsay Greer

  • Commentary |

    Recent research has revealed considerable diversity in the short-range ordering of metallic glass, identifying favoured and unfavoured local atomic configurations coexisting in an inhomogeneous amorphous structure. Tailoring the population of these local motifs may selectively enhance a desired property.

    • Evan Ma

  • Letter |

    Entropic elasticity, typical of rubbers and known to also occur in organic polymers with certain network structures, is now demonstrated for phosphate-glass fibres with highly anisotropic structures.

    • Seiji Inaba
    • , Hideo Hosono
    •  & Setsuro Ito

  • News & Views |

    A high-throughput approach combining combinatorial deposition of materials with parallel blow-forming speeds up the discovery rate of bulk metallic glasses that can be easily formed into complex shapes.

    • Dan B. Miracle

  • Article |

    For metallic glasses composed of three or more elements, optimizing their composition to satisfy a combination of properties is a formidable task. Now, a high-throughput strategy that can simultaneously fabricate thousands of alloy compositions and characterize them for thermoplastic formability through parallel blow forming makes possible the identification of the alloy composition with the highest thermoplastic formability.

    • Shiyan Ding
    • , Yanhui Liu
    •  & Jan Schroers

  • Commentary |

    The challenge to link understanding and manipulation at the microscale to functional behaviour at the macroscale defines the frontiers of mesoscale science.

    • Sidney Yip
    •  & Michael P. Short

  • News & Views |

    Discrepancies in the glass-forming ability of metallic glasses have been explained in terms of the presence of local structural features in the liquid. Findings from molecular dynamics simulations now show that the structure of the crystal/liquid interface may play a bigger role than previously thought.

    • K. F. Kelton

  • Letter |

    The development of metallic glasses is hindered by the lack of mechanistic understanding of why some alloys crystallize quickly and thus are poorer at forming glasses than those that crystallize slowly. A molecular dynamics study of the growth rate of a planar crystal surface in model metallic glasses now shows that their glass-forming ability is determined by the structure of the crystal/liquid interface.

    • Chunguang Tang
    •  & Peter Harrowell

  • News & Views |

    It has been shown that glasses prepared by physical vapour deposition have extraordinary stability. A computer algorithm that mimics such a process has now identified the optimal deposition temperature and the glasses' structural features.

    • Giorgio Parisi
    •  & Francesco Sciortino

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