October 3, 2012

Ames Laboratory finds ordered atoms in glass materials




Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Ames Laboratory have discovered the underlying order in metallic glasses, which may hold the key to the ability to create new high-tech alloys with specific properties.

Glass materials may have a far less randomly arranged structure than formerly thought.

Over the years, the ideas of how metallic glasses form have been evolving, from just a random packing, to very small ordered clusters, to realizing that longer range chemical and topological order exists.