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Using Lasers to Create Better Glass:

Microscopically, glasses are solids that look more like liquids—they lack a regular crystalline structure. The liquid character is no accident, since a typical glass is made by cooling a fluid rapidly. If done in the right way, this skips the usual crystallization that occurs at the freezing point of the material, leaving a disordered state.

If we want to create a glass with specific properties, we need precise control over the fluid-to-glass transition, but that has proven very difficult to achieve in practice. To this end, Yunlong Guo et al. have developed a way to produce stable glasses made of polymers.

As described in a Nature Materials paper published February 5, the resulting glasses are extremely lightweight, have a higher transitional temperature, and maintain their properties up to a higher temperatures than normal glasses.

The researchers made the glasses by deposition rather than cooling, using a technique known as matrix-assisted pulsed laser evaporation, or MAPLE. The result is a glass built up of nanoscale globules, a material with interesting theoretical properties as well as potential applications.

(via Pulsed lasers make lightweight glasses out of polymers)