Bending world's thinnest glass shows atoms' dance

Watch what happens when you bend and break the world's thinnest glass. This glass, discovered by Cornell researchers and their international team of collaborators, was recently featured in the Guinness Book of World Records and is made of the same compounds as everyday windowpanes. Now, a research team led by David A. Muller, professor of applied and engineering physics and co-director of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science, and Ute Kaiser, professor at the University of Ulm, has used an electron microscope to bend, deform and melt the one-molecule-thick glass. These are all things that happen just before glass shatters, and for the first time, the researchers have directly imaged such deformations and the resulting "dance" of rearranging atoms in silica glass. This newest work is published Oct. Even though glass is a common material, it is notoriously hard to study, said Pinshane Huang, a graduate student working with Muller and the paper's first author. Glass is known as an amorphous solid because its atoms are rigid like a crystal but disordered like a liquid.