30 pages of calculations settle a 30-year debate over a mysterious new phase of matter
May 30, 2017
With 30 pages of handwritten calculations, Duke postdoctoral fellow Sho Yaida has laid to rest a 30-year-old mystery about the nature of glass and 'disordered' materials at low temperatures. They may in fact be a new state of matter. Credit: Irem Altan
Zoom in on a crystal and you will find an ordered array of atoms, evenly spaced like the windows on the Empire State Building. But zoom in on a piece of glass, and the picture looks a bit messier—more like a random pile of sand, or perhaps the windows on a Frank Gehry building.
The highly-ordered nature of crystals makes them fairly simple to understand mathematically, and physicists have developed theories that capture all sorts of crystal properties, from how they absorb heat to what happens when they break.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2017-05-pages-year-debate-mysterious-phase.html#jCp
