Featured paper: Secrets of glass structural relaxation finally revealed.
A team of researchers from CeRTEV (one of the largest academic centers for glass research in the world, located in São Carlos, SP, Brazil) has carried out the first experimental observation of the changes that occur in the structure of a glass during relaxation and nucleation, two processes that occur at the nanometer scale in all glasses and that impact their properties.
It is worth remembering that glasses are amorphous materials: their atoms do not appear in an organized and periodic arrangement. Furthermore, they are out of thermodynamic equilibrium and therefore tend to seek stability. In that search, the structure of the glasses undergoes rearrangements, which tend to either make it more fluid (relaxation), or to form the first crystals (nucleation) to, finally, crystallize.