For nearly a century, scientists have understood how crystalline materials—such as metals and semiconductors—bend without ...

Researchers explain the distinctive low-temperature thermal properties of glasses using molecular dynamics simulations. By focusing on string-like defects, they were able to create a unified ...

(Nanowerk News) We can look through glass, but what glass itself looks like on the inside has so far remained a mystery - at least as far as the precise position of the atoms is concerned. Scientists ...

'Amorphous ice' forms when water is rapidly cooled to form a disordered glass-like solid rather than the common form of ice, which is crystalline. Now researchers have found a surprising degree of ...

Many substances around us, from table salt and sugar to most metals, are arranged into crystals. Because their molecules are laid out in an orderly, repetitive pattern, much is understood about their ...

AZoNano speaks to Dr. John Miao about his involvement in the breakthrough research that could rewrite our understanding of how substances are formed at an atomic level. Using an innovative atomic ...

Researchers in Singapore and the USA show how to choose the best candidate alloys for making metallic glasses. Materials such as glass or polystyrene are often called amorphous solids – literally ...

Water frozen in the depths of space has long been considered a shapeless, frozen fog. For decades, scientists believed it formed without structure, too cold and still to grow orderly crystals. But a ...

Glass, a ubiquitous material, is surprisingly made from ordinary sand. Intense heat, comparable to a space shuttle's re-entry, transforms sand's quartz crystals into an amorphous solid—a state between ...

Until just a few years back, the existence of natural quasicrystals — unique materials that are neither crystalline nor amorphous — was considered an impossibility. Over the past five years, however, ...

A new study challenges the notion that the atomic structure of glass is indistinguishable from that of a liquid­ ­— at least for a certain kind of glass called "amorphous ice" that forms when water is ...