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 […]