Liquid glass

Ads by Eonads New State of Matter: Liquid Glass

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Ads by Eonads >Using a technique called confocal microscopy, a team of scientists from Germany and the Netherlands has found that suspensions of ellipsoidal colloids form an unexpected state of matter, a liquid glass, in which individual particles are able to move yet unable to rotate.

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Suspensions of colloidal particles are widely spread in nature and technology and have been studied intensely over more than a century,” said co-senior author Professor Andreas Zumbusch from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Konstanz and his colleagues.

“When the density of such suspensions is increased to high volume fractions, often their structural dynamics are arrested in a disordered, glassy state before they can form an ordered structure.”

“To date, most experiments have been done using spherical colloids. The recent interest in synthetic colloids as material building blocks, however, has led to the development of a multitude of novel techniques for the synthesis of colloidal particles with specific geometries and interactions.”

Ads by Eonads style="font-family: times;">researchers tested different concentrations of particles in the fluid, tracking how well they could move and rotate. Eventually they found that at higher concentrations, the particles blocked each other from rotating, but they could still move, forming a liquid glass state.

“At certain particle densities orientational motion froze whereas translational motion persisted, resulting in glassy states where the particles clustered to form local structures with similar orientation,” says Andreas Zumbusch, lead author of the study.

The team says that the observed behavior comes from two competing glass transitions interacting with each other. Liquid glass has been predicted for decades, and the new observation suggests that similar processes could be at work in other glass-forming systems. Ads by Eonads