Scientists happen to create completely new types of glass

Glass, in essence, has randomness. It is made through melting many minerals together at high temperatures. Glass has an amorphous, messy structure like a suddenly frozen liquid. However, by chance, scientists have created a completely new type of crystalline, with a regulatory molecular structure.

Randomly discover about new types of glass

Scientists began to recognize the difference of the glass they created when observing some consistent peaks in their spectrophotometer data.

The new type of glass has a structure that conforms to the rules, as opposed to the structure of common known glass types today.(Photo: IFLScience)

According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences magazine, the team measured how much polarization glass (changing direction) of a beam of laser light . Normally, the interaction of the laser beam with the glass will produce a graph with no special features, with all results being random. However, this time, the graph appears with rules.

The phenomenon may not sound outstanding, but is a reliable sign of the periodic arrangement of molecules.

" This is a big surprise. The randomness is almost a glass characteristic. At least we are used to thinking like that. What we've just done is proof, people can make glass." And now, when we understand the origin of such effects, we can try to control that structure by manipulating the way we create these types of glass, " said the researcher. Juan de Pablo of the University of Chicago said.

The secret of molecular order in the new type of glass seems to be the way it was created. Instead of cooling the liquid glass that is flowing to solid, the new glass is formed using glass vapors. This technique gently builds solid glass layers by coating the vapor of organic molecules onto a surface in a vacuum.

Glass layering is done correctly. It helps to keep the molecules oriented.

This process is highly dependent on temperature . Temperature should be within a narrow range, in which liquid vapor can solidify. The molecular order of glass can be refined by changing the temperature while the glass is precipitating. However, once the glass has formed, it will keep the molecular order even while changing the temperature.

Researcher de Pablo commented: "Glass is one of the least understood layers of materials. They have the structure of a liquid (amorphous), but they are solids. It is a mystical awareness. We have been able to control the orientation of these amorphous materials that can contain many important theoretical and technical implications. It is unclear what they are, but this is a new field of research and a class of materials that never existed before. "