Bending World's Thinnest Glass Shows Atoms' Dance

Shruti Suresh

Period 2 Mathieu
Biology Honors
19 October 2013


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131015095638.htm
 Cornell University. "Bending world's thinnest glass shows atoms' dance." ScienceDaily, 15 Oct. 2013. Web. 19 Oct. 2013.

Summary: 
       Researchers from Cornell University and Germany's University of Ulm previously led a study about atomically thin glass and on October 15, 2013, they created the world's thinnest piece of glass- a one molecule-thick sheet. The "dancing" referred to is the movement of rearrangement atoms make right before silica glass is shattered. To directly image this disfiguration, the researchers used a transmission electron microscope and shot a beam of high-energy electrons at the glass which caused the glass to structurally deform. As the researchers looked at the images of deformed glass they saw that the atoms were moving around and concluded that this was how atoms in glass behaved when the glass was deformed. Glass is an amorphous liquid meaning that its atoms are unique. The atoms are stiff, like a solid but are also in a disarray, like a liquid. Because of this strange feature, glass was infamous for being hard to study. But now with the thin glass sheet, researchers are able to not only study it's structure but also it's dynamics. They can observe how the atoms break one by one in the glass when it shatters or deforms. This is a huge breakthrough for scientists because no had been able to see the repositions of atoms in glass when you contorted it, until just a few days ago.


Connection: 
       This is directly relevant to our curriculum in Biology because this article talks and explains about the properties of atoms. With this discovery, we can understand the structure of a glass atom and research and study its properties so we can better understand the different kinds of materials and atoms. In the article the scientists explain how this discovery helped them figure out how atoms behaved when glass was shattered. In our curriculum, we also studied the behavior and structure of atoms. For example, we studied the behavior and different properties of water molecules.