UChicago
researchers co-led experiments that produced glass with an organized
molecular
structure, a material previously thought to be entirely amorphous and random.
Copyright
Wokandapix
(August 14, 2015) When
Prof. Juan de Pablo and his collaborators set about to explain unusual peaks in
what should have been featureless optical data, they thought there was a
problem in their calculations. In fact, what they were seeing was real. The
peaks were an indication of molecular order in a material thought to be
entirely amorphous and random: Their experiments had produced a new kind of
glass.
Their unforeseen discovery, reported in a paper published in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and chosen by Science as an
editor’s choice paper in Materials Science, could offer a simple way to improve
the efficiency of electronic devices such as light-emitting diodes, optical
fibers and solar cells. It also could have important theoretical implications
for understanding the still surprisingly mysterious materials called glasses.
“This is a big surprise,” de Pablo said. “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.”
De Pablo is a theorist and the Liew Family Professor in
Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. He and Ivan Lyubimov, a
postdoctoral fellow in his group, worked with a group of experimentalists led
by Mark Ediger at the University of Wisconsin, doing computer simulations of
their physical experiments.