Scientists have by accident created glass with a regular molecular pattern.
The spectroscopic data of glass should show random peaks, but instead regular peaks occurred.
This might sound useless, but it is a reliable indicator of a periodic arrangement of molecules. The research can be found in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This is a big surprise,” commentedJuan de Pablo, from the University of Chicago. “Randomness is almost the defining feature of glasses. At least we used to think so. What we have done is to demonstrate that one can create glasses where there is some well-defined organization. And now that we understand the origin of such effects, we can try to control that organization by manipulating the way we prepare these glasses.”
The reasoning behind this regular molecular pattern appears to be the method used to create the special glass. Rather than cooling flowing liquid glass to a solid form, this new special type of glass was formed using glass vapor. The technique builds up layers of solid glass by depositing a vapor of organic molecules onto a surface, regulated in a vacuum environment. The growing of the glass layer by layer is highly precise. It traps the molecules in their “true” orientation.
The temperature of the environment has to be within a narrow range where liquid vapor can solidify. The order can be tuned by adjusting the temperature while the glass is forming, but once the glass is set it retains the molecular order even during temperature changes.
Though only a small number of molecules were oriented differently in the new glass, the effects are significant to the scientifi community. The next step for de Pablo and the team will be to try to enhance this regularity and test different materials.