Science Alert August 27, 2023
Oxygen and silicon flow when glass is heated. If it is cooled slowly the particles form into quartz. If it cools quickly, the particles retain a disordered arrangement, and it becomes an amorphous solid. Researchers at UC Berkeley used computation and simulation to determine that this transition might not be so neat, featuring a special activity of particles sitting between their normal liquid and supercooled states. The particles in a supercooled liquid change their configurations resulting in excitations. The researchers treated these excitations in a 2D supercooled liquid as defects in a crystalline solid. They found that when the temperature changes the bound pairs of excitations become unbound at the onset temperature, causing the material to lose its rigidity and behave as a normal liquid. The researchers believe that their model can be expanded to understand how the transition works in three dimensions, too, and offer a theoretical underpinning for future experimental work… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
(A) Equilibrium relaxation time Ď„eq as a function of the inverse temperature… Credit: PNAS, March 31, 2023, 120 (14) e2209144120