Assistant Professor Mathieu Bauchy and members of his research group, PARISlab, find out why high-performance glass flows, and how fast. Research was published in the journal of Physical Review Letters by lead author, Civil and Environmental Engineering Doctoral student Yingtian Yu, Post-Doctoral Scholar Bu Wang, Materials Science Doctoral student Mengyi Wang, undergraduate student Dawei Zhang, and Associate Professor and Edward K. and Linda L. Rice Chair in Materials Science Gaurav Sant.

Atomic+structure+glass_midThe UCLA Newsroom writes, ‘High-tech kinds of glass, like Corning Gorilla Glass, a scratch- and damage-resistant glass used on more than one billion smartphones and tablets screens, susceptibility to room-temperature deformations have been known to exist for a few years. Now researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have discovered why such flowing happens and how fast. Using molecular dynamics simulations of different glasses, the researchers showed that high-performance glass can exhibit some long-term deformations that are proportional to how large the piece of glass is. Glass on your mobile phone’s screen might not flow at all in its short lifetime, but large screens, such as those for giant TV screens can start to flow during the first few months after the glass is manufactured at a tiny but perceptible rate, about 10 micrometers per year for a one-meter-square piece of glass. While rate may seem slow, the effect is enough to limit how large these screens can be, the researchers said.”