Related papers: Nano-Ductility in Silicate Glasses is Driven by To…

Understanding, predicting and eventually improving the resistance to fracture of silicate materials is of primary importance to design new glasses that would be tougher, while retaining their transparency. However, the atomic mechanism of…

We use large-scale simulations to investigate the dynamic fracture of silica and sodium-silicate glasses under uniaxial tension. The stress-strain curves demonstrate that silica glass is brittle whereas the glasses rich in Na show…

The strengths of glasses are intricately linked to their atomic-level heterogeneity. Atomistic simulations are frequently used to investigate the statistical physics of this relationship, compensating for the limited spatiotemporal…

We have studied the low speed fracture regime for different glassy materials with variable but controlled length scales of heterogeneity in a carefully mastered surrounding atmosphere. By using optical and atomic force (AFM) microscopy…

In order to design tougher materials, it is crucial to understand the relationship between their composition and their resistance to fracture. To this end, we investigate the fracture toughness of usual sodium silicate glasses (NS) and…

Indentation has been widely used for investigating the mechanical behavior of glasses. However, how the various microscopic properties (such as atomic structure and mechanics) of glass evolve from the immediate contact with the indenter to…

Oxide glasses with a network structure are omnipresent in daily life. Often, they are regarded as isotropic materials; however, structural anisotropy can be induced through processing in mechanical fields and leads to unique materials…

We report nano-scale mechanical heterogeneity of a metallic glass characterized by dynamic atomic force microscopy. Apparent energy dissipation with the variation of ~12%, originating from non-uniform distribution of local viscoelasticity,…

If quenched fast enough, a liquid is able to avoid crystallization and will remain in a metastable supercooled state down to the glass transition, with an important increase in viscosity upon further cooling. There are important differences…

We have studied the low speed fracture regime for different glassy materials with variable but controlled length scales of heterogeneity in a carefully mastered surrounding atmosphere. By using optical and atomic force microscopy (AFM)…

The presence of dynamical heterogeneities, i.e. nanometer-scale regions containing molecules rearranging cooperatively at very different rates compared to the bulk, is increasingly being recognized as crucial in our understanding of the…

The existence of heterogeneity in the dynamics of supercooled liquids is believed to be one of the hallmarks of the glass transition. Intense research has been carried out in the past to understand the origin of this heterogeneity in…

We report in situ Atomic Force Microscopy experiments which reveal the presence of nanoscale damage cavities ahead of a stress-corrosion crack tip in glass. Their presence might explain the departure from linear elasticity observed in the…

Mixing theoretical topological structures with cutting-edge simulation methods, a recent study in Nature Communications has finally confirmed the existence of topological defects in glasses and their crucial role for plasticity.

In the framework of topological constraint theory, network glasses are classified as flexible, stressed--rigid, or isostatic if the number of atomic constraints is smaller, larger, or equal to the number of atomic degrees of freedom. Here,…

Dilute magnetic nanoparticle systems exhibit slow dynamics [1] due to a broad distribution of relaxation times that can be traced to a correspondingly broad distribution of particle sizes [1]. However, at higher concentrations interparticle…

Recent computational and laboratory experiments have shown that the brittle-ductile transitions in metallic glasses such as Vitreloy1 are strongly sensitive to the initial effective disorder (or "fictive") temperature. Glasses with lower…

Dynamical heterogeneity, in which transitory local fluctuations occur in the conformation and dynamics of constituent particles, is widely hypothesized to be essential to evolution of supercooled liquids into the structural glass state. Yet…

Dynamical heterogeneities -- strong fluctuations near the glass transition -- are believed to be crucial to explain much of the glass transition phenomenology. One possible hypothesis for their origin is that they emerge from soft…

Supercooled liquids exhibit spatial heterogeneity in the dynamics of their fluctuating atomic arrangements. The length and time scales of the heterogeneous dynamics are central to the glass transition and influence nucleation and growth of…