Glass might look and feel like a perfectly ordered solid, but up close its chaotic arrangement of particles more closely resemble the tumultuous mess of a freefalling liquid frozen in time.
Known as amorphous solids, materials in this state defy easy explanation. New research involving computation and simulation is yielding clues. In particular, it suggests that, somewhere in between liquid and solid states is a kind of rearrangement we didn’t know existed.
According to scientists Dimitrios Fraggedakis, Muhammad Hasyim, and Kranthi Mandadapu of the University of California, Berkeley, there is a behavior on the temperature boundary of supercooled liquids and solids where the static particles remain excited, ‘twitching’ in place.
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