Glasses articles within Nature Materials

Featured

  • 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

  • Article |

    Glasses with extraordinary kinetic stability have been made in the laboratory by physical vapour deposition. A computational algorithm that mimics such a deposition process now reveals that deposition at the temperature at which the configurational entropy vanishes leads to ultrastable glasses that are truly amorphous, pack uniformly and have energies that are equivalent to those of equilibrium supercooled liquids.

    • Sadanand Singh
    • , M. D. Ediger
    •  & Juan J. de Pablo

  • Letter |

    Whether a liquid forms a crystal or a glass on solidification depends on many factors. The finding now that a disordered structure is favoured in B2O3 because the system cannot choose between several crystalline polymorphs of similar energy highlights a link between glass formation and crystallization.

    • Guillaume Ferlat
    • , Ari Paavo Seitsonen
    •  & Francesco Mauri

  • News & Views |

    Evidence of a transition between two coexisting liquids of the same composition in a water–glycerol mixture, where glycerol prevents the crystallization of water, provides a unique link to an elusive liquid–liquid transition in pure water.

    • Austen Angell

  • News & Views |

    The finding that metallic glasses inherit their elastic properties from solvent atoms leads to a new understanding of the complex relationship between glassy structure, deformation and mechanical properties.

    • Wei Hua Wang

  • News & Views |

    When quenching a liquid to form a glass, order-of-magnitude changes in cooling speed have small effects on the glass's properties. It is now shown that laser-assisted vapour deposition produces nanostructured glassy polymer films with a higher glass transition temperature and lower density than conventional quenched polymer glasses.

    • Mark D Ediger
    •  & Lian Yu

  • Article |

    The realization of ultrastable, nanostructured glassy polymer films by pulsed-laser evaporation is reported. Compared with standard poly(methyl methacrylate) glass, these polymer glasses are 40% less dense and have a 40-degree-higher glass transition temperature. Their unique properties, which are a manifestation of their globular nanostructure, should make these glasses attractive for applications where weight and stability are critical.

    • Yunlong Guo
    • , Anatoli Morozov
    •  & Rodney D. Priestley

  • Letter |

    Toothpaste, mayonnaise and other systems are soft particle glasses. In these, the soft particles are jammed so that the glasses behave like weak solids at rest but at sufficient stress flow like liquids. This has made their theoretical understanding difficult. A new micromechanical model is now able to predict the rheology of these soft particle glasses.

    • Jyoti R. Seth
    • , Lavanya Mohan
    •  & Roger T. Bonnecaze

  • Article |

    In contrast to the long-range order of crystalline materials, non-crystalline compounds, such as metallic glasses, have a more inhomogeneous distribution of atoms on a local scale. Atomic force acoustic microscopy now demonstrates how these local variations translate into much stronger variations in local elastic properties of a metallic glass compared with its crystalline counterpart.

    • Hannes Wagner
    • , Dennis Bedorf
    •  & Konrad Samwer

  • Article |

    Computer simulations of nematic liquid crystals confined in bicontinuous porous geometries show that frustration and topology lead to multiple, metastable trajectories of defect lines that can be memorized on application of external fields. These topologically enabled metastable states could be exploited to optically functionalize orientationally ordered materials.

    • Takeaki Araki
    • , Marco Buscaglia
    •  & Hajime Tanaka

  • News & Views |

    Metallic glasses are strong but can be brittle. The discovery of a metallic glass that also shows a high toughness against fracture is remarkable, and establishes metallic glasses, at least those based on noble metals, as materials with the highest known damage tolerance.

    • A. Lindsay Greer

  • Article |

    Metallic glasses are strong but at the same time are brittle once they yield. A new Pd-based metallic glass now shows significantly enhanced fracture toughness. The unique combination of yield strength and toughness makes this glass comparable to the toughest as well as strongest materials known.

    • Marios D. Demetriou
    • , Maximilien E. Launey
    •  & Robert O. Ritchie

  • News & Views |

    The first diffraction patterns from the individual atomic packing clusters in a metallic glass finally enable the direct study of local order in amorphous alloys.

    • Evan Ma
    •  & Ze Zhang

  • Letter |

    The atomic configuration of metallic glasses is a long-standing issue important to the understanding of their properties. Nanobeam electron diffraction experiments now enable a direct determination of the local atomic order in a metallic glass.

    • Akihiko Hirata
    • , Pengfei Guan
    •  & Mingwei Chen

  • Letter |

    The amorphous nature of metallic glasses makes them interesting for structural applications. However, the interplay between the nature of atomic structures and mechanical properties remains poorly understood. Dynamic micropillar tests now show the important contribution of the inelastic deformation of atomistic free-volume zones to the deformation behaviour of metallic glasses.

    • J. C. Ye
    • , J. Lu
    •  & Y. Yang

  • Letter |

    Bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) show good compressive mechanical properties that make them attractive for applications. However, BMGs tend to fail under tensile strain. Through secondary phases these problems can be remedied to some degree. A mechanism is now demonstrated where BMGs show enhanced tensile ductility though the deformation-induced precipitation of nanocrystals.

    • S. Pauly
    • , S. Gorantla
    •  & J. Eckert

  • Article |

    As a liquid approaches its glass transition its dynamics slow down and simultaneously the material becomes more heterogeneous. A static structural heterogeneity, now shown to be widely present in glass-forming liquids, is suggested to be the origin of this dynamic heterogeneity that links structural parameters to the glass transition.

    • Hajime Tanaka
    • , Takeshi Kawasaki
    •  & Keiji Watanabe

  • Letter |

    The mechanical properties of many materials are different on the nanoscale than they are in the bulk. In the case of metallic glasses, nanometre-scale samples show enhanced ductility. This tensile ductility has now been quantified for samples with diameters down to 100 nm, where a new regime of increased ductility during deformation is observed.

    • Dongchan Jang
    •  & Julia R. Greer

  • Letter |

    Jamming transitions of disordered systems such as foams, gels and colloidal suspensions, describe the change from a liquid to a solid state. An investigation of the three-dimensional properties of jamming shows how, for example, unjamming occurs simultaneously in all directions even if it is induced in one direction only.

    • G. Ovarlez
    • , Q. Barral
    •  & P. Coussot

Browse broader subjects

Browse Glasses across other nature.com journals