One of the few things scientists know for certain about glass is that its atomic structure is chaos. Neither liquid nor solid, glass is its own phase — a material somewhere between these two states of matter — that owes its existence to the way it is formed.

Glass is made by heating a mixture of materials to molten temperatures and then quickly cooling the scorching hot liquid, a process called “quenching.” Such a rapid transition doesn’t give the atoms enough time or energy to arrange themselves into the highly organized lattice-like structures of solid matter. Instead, they remain disordered, like molecules in a flowing liquid, but frozen in place, rigid like a solid.

“In many ways, glass is a state of matter all its own,” said John Mauro, Dorothy Pate Enright Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State. “Any liquid can form a glass if it’s cooled rapidly enough. You can make glass out of water. In fact, physicists believe that most of the water in the universe is probably in glassy form. In movies, they use glass made from sugars for breakable windows, and there are dozens of glasses made from metallic alloys. Anything that can be liquefied can be brought into the glassy state if quenched fast enough to avoid crystallization.”….

Mauro and a team of students and scientists have invented and engineered an entirely new family of glass, called LionGlass, that requires significantly less energy to produce and is much more damage resistant than standard soda lime silicate glass. Unlike other humanmade glasses, the composition for LionGlass is not based on the age-old mixture of quartz sand, soda ash and limestone.

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