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Glasses are hard, brittle materials, produced by high-temperature mixing followed by rapid cooling. Glasses have an amorphous atomic structure, and are usually made from a fused mixture of oxides, such as lime or silicon dioxide.
Living cell collectives can jam and unjam through many pathways, yet the details remain elusive. Arora et al. design a monolayer of deformable cell-mimics composed of chiral active granular ellipsoids confined in flexible paper rings and show a re-entrant jamming transition mediated solely by cell shape change.
The mechanisms of shear band initiation and propagation in amorphous metallic alloys is an open question of materials science. Here, the authors measure local strains around propagating shear bands and propose a model describing the plasticity of metallic glasses at different length scales.
Despite the importance of shear-thinning rheology which many glassy materials universally experience under shear flow, significant discrepancies between theoretical explanations and experimental observations have remained unaddressed for over two decades. Here the authors renovate the theory to address these discrepancies and establish a universal mechanism of shear thinning.
The study of the general factors underlying clogging are fragmented and application-driven due to its broad spectrum of applications. The authors propose a holistic understanding of the clogging process by investigating the clogging of a granular hopper flow using high-speed imaging, finding a signature formation of precursory chain structures.
Solvating polar polymers with ionic liquids at appropriate concentrations can produce a unique class of materials called glassy gels with desirable properties of both glasses and gels.
Physical vapour deposition of small-molecule glass formers onto soft substrates enhances the local dynamics at the top free surface, leading to the formation of denser glasses and providing access to states deeper in the potential energy landscape.
Ageing is a non-linear, irreversible process that defines many properties of glassy materials. Now, it is shown that the so-called material-time formalism can describe ageing in terms of equilibrium-like properties.
Processible centimetre-scale porous glasses using zeolitic imidazolate framework (ZIF) materials are developed, while fine-tuning of the processing conditions allows control of pore size and molecular sieving properties.
By removing water from crystalline molecular complexes, microporous metal–organic framework glasses are formed. The glasses can be obtained in monolithic shapes by melt-quenching.
Disordered systems that are far from equilibrium relax slowly towards their equilibrium. Now, we learn that the irreversible plastic deformations that form the wrinkles of a crumpled sheet result in a complex energy landscape that ages logarithmically.
Oxide glasses can be intrinsically toughened by forming crystal-like, medium-range order clusters, which transform inversely to the amorphous state under stress, exciting multiple shear bands for plastic deformation.