Scientists Discover New Way of Making Glass

A team of researchers from the Universities of Dusseldorf and Bristol have come up with an innovative technique of making glass.

This innovative method of making glass uses a technique that controls how the atoms within a substance are arranged around each other. Glass is a peculiar state of matter that has the mechanical properties of a solid but an amorphous structure like a liquid. When the cooling point drops below its smelting point it either crystallizes or transforms into a glass.

It was in 1952, that Sir Charles Frank at the University of Bristol argued that the structure of glass should not be entirely disordered like a liquid but rather be filled with structural motifs like the bicapped square antiprism.

This has been revealed through experiments and computer simulations on glassy materials, but what remains unknown is the role they play in how a liquid becomes a solid.

A new type of a glass was created by the researchers, in a computer by encouraging atoms in a nickel-phosphorus alloy to form the pictured polyhedron. The liquid stopped flowing on the formation of polyhedral, it had converted to solid.

The researchers found that instead of cooling, a liquid can turn into a glass by changing its structure.

Dr Paddy Royall of the University of Bristol said: "The method we developed employed computer simulations of liquids, performed on the University of Bristol's BlueCrystal supercomputer, where the atoms were driven to form more polyhedra.

"Although many more polyhedra were formed, the atomic arrangements were still disordered rather than a periodic arrangement as seen in crystals. This means that the solid that was formed had to be a glass."

Dr Thomas Speck of Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf said: "These results mean that structure can control whether a material is liquid or solid and thus open the way to design new glasses: For example metallic glasses whose great lightness and strength promise exciting applications and chalcogenide glasses which are used in memory applications and phase switch memory, a possible future technology for data storage."

The research is published November 9 in Physical Review Letters.