Press release issued 22 June 2008Research published in Nature
Materials Imagine a plane that has wings made out of glass.
Thanks to a major breakthrough in understanding the nature of
glass by scientists at the University of Bristol, this has just
become a possibility. Despite its solid appearance, glass is
actually a ‘jammed’ state of matter that moves very slowly. Like
cars in a traffic jam, atoms in a glass can’t reach their
destination because the route is blocked by their neighbours, so
it never quite becomes a ‘proper’ solid. For more than 50 years
most scientists have tried to understand just what glass is.
Work so far has concentrated on trying to understand the traffic
jam, but now Dr Paddy Royall from the University of Bristol,
with colleagues in Canberra and Tokyo, has shown that the
problem really lies with the destination, not with the traffic
jam. Publishing today (22 June 2008) in Nature Materials, the
team has revealed that glass ‘fails’ to be a solid due to the
special atomic structures that