Very thin glass

The world record for thinning glass was broken by an accidental discovery by scientists at Cornell University in the United States and Ulm University in Germany and the glass is only two atoms thick.

In the process of finding a way to produce pure graphene (a kind of metamaterial is also very interesting), researchers notice the formation of a strange membrane, but when thoroughly understood, this is actually a layer of glass. Created by silicon and oxygen.

The researchers suspected that the glass was caused by a gas leak that produced a reaction on copper plates used to make graphene, turning the copper sheet into a glass production source like a furnace. Quartz.

A snapshot of the nuclear structure of the ultra-thin glass. (Photo: CORNELL)

This accidental discovery is a breakthrough, allowing scientists to take a closer look at the structure of the glass . Using an electron microscope to examine ultra-thin glass samples, scientists took photographs showing the precise arrangement of the nuclei in the glass.

This is the first time scientists have been able to do this. This opportunity has also led to another surprise for scientists, turning out that physicist William Houlder Zachariasen was extremely accurate when attempting to map the glass structure back in the 1932s.

On the real application of this ultra-thin glass, scientists say in the future it can be used in resistors and help speed up the processing of computers, smart phones ...