New Physics Revealed by Bending the World's Thinnest Glass

The world's thinnest glass may have more to offer scientists than just being part of the Guinness Book of World Records. It turns out that by bending this glass, the researchers have been able to directly image the deformation associated with breaking glass and the resulting "dance" of rearranging atoms in silica glass.

Although glass is a common material, it's notoriously hard to study. In fact, it's known as an amorphous solid because its atoms are rigid like a crystal but disordered like a liquid. Yet with the creation of the thinnest glass, the researchers were able to get a closer look at exactly how glass is formed and how it reacts.

The thinnest glass is so thin that its individual silicon and oxygen atoms are clearly visible with the use of electron microscopy. In fact, it was first created by accident as the scientists were working on making graphene. When it was formed, it helped confirm that glass was an amorphous solid. Now, scientists are learning more about the physical properties of glass.

"No one has ever before been able to see how the atoms in a glass rearrange when you push on them," said David Muller, one of the researchers, in a news release.

In the past, there have been sophisticated theories that have described how these atoms behave when bent or broken. However, the theories have been difficult to verify. In this case, the scientists used an electron microscope to bend, deform and melt the one-molecule-thick glass.

"We had all these pictures of the glass, and when we strung them together into videos, we were surprised to see the atoms wiggling and jiggling around," said Muller in a news release.

It turned out the researchers were looking at the building blocks for how glass deforms. In fact, they were able to see atoms moving in a glass. They saw that parts of the glass melted under the electron beam, forming moving boundaries between solid and molten glass.

The findings could eventually help lead to atom-by-atom designs for stronger glass panes or more robust transistors. This, in turn, could be extremely useful for material development in the future.

The findings are published in the journal Science.

Want to see the glass moving for yourself? Check out the video below, courtesy of Cornell University.