About this Research Topic
We are living in the age of nanotechnology. Researchers are engrossed to look the matter at the atomic level and explore their exciting properties by manipulating their nanostructures. Most of the developments in this area are happening in the crystalline materials. There is extensive progress materialized in the last few decades towards the structure-property correlation of the nano-crystalline materials. In this context, glass also has contributed substantially to the area of nanotechnology. Evolution of the nanoscience and the glass have a long history of the journey together. A good example of this strong relationship is the famous Lycurgus Cup of the 4th century. The Lycurgus cup is embedded metallic nanoparticles in the glass matrix and revealed the interesting dichroic property. In recent times, nanocrystalline glass-ceramics emerged as an interesting material for many cutting-edge technological applications. These nanocrystalline glass-ceramics have improved the mechanical, optical, thermal, electrical, magnetic, etc. properties to a great extent compared to the parent glass.
Glass is a disordered material and hence it does not have any distinct microstructure like the crystalline materials. However, there are many new developments happen recently to understand the structural and chemical inhomogeneity of the glass at the nanoscale. Furthermore, researchers have discovered that the glasses are not only showing short-range order rather in some cases they revealed the medium-range ordered structure. So, there is a renewed interest to modify the property of glass by controlling its nanostructure. A new idea of nanoglass has been conceptualized during the last few years that demonstrated the presence of two glassy nanostructures such as glassy core and glass-glass interface. It is found that the property of such nanoglass is different from the conventional glass of the same composition. In another evolving research, interest is to improve the mechanical properties of glass through plastic deformation. Plastic deformation facilitates the different atomic configurations other than the un-deformed glass at the nanoscale. Many such exciting pieces of research are going on to explore the glass properties by their nanostructures.
The scope of this Research Topic is to understand the structure of glass and its properties at the nanoscale using advanced techniques. This Research Topic encourages the new findings on the nanostructure of glass for their potential applications toward emerging technology. This includes both experimental and simulation work. Here we invite the individual contributions on the nanostructured glass of particular interest include (but are not limited to):
• Synthesis methodology
• Structural inhomogeneity
• Plastic deformation
• Structural relaxation
• Simulation on glass structure
• Nano-crystalline glass ceramics
• Nano-metal glass nanocomposites
• Plasmon based nanophotonic glass
• Technological applications
Glass is a disordered material and hence it does not have any distinct microstructure like the crystalline materials. However, there are many new developments happen recently to understand the structural and chemical inhomogeneity of the glass at the nanoscale. Furthermore, researchers have discovered that the glasses are not only showing short-range order rather in some cases they revealed the medium-range ordered structure. So, there is a renewed interest to modify the property of glass by controlling its nanostructure. A new idea of nanoglass has been conceptualized during the last few years that demonstrated the presence of two glassy nanostructures such as glassy core and glass-glass interface. It is found that the property of such nanoglass is different from the conventional glass of the same composition. In another evolving research, interest is to improve the mechanical properties of glass through plastic deformation. Plastic deformation facilitates the different atomic configurations other than the un-deformed glass at the nanoscale. Many such exciting pieces of research are going on to explore the glass properties by their nanostructures.
The scope of this Research Topic is to understand the structure of glass and its properties at the nanoscale using advanced techniques. This Research Topic encourages the new findings on the nanostructure of glass for their potential applications toward emerging technology. This includes both experimental and simulation work. Here we invite the individual contributions on the nanostructured glass of particular interest include (but are not limited to):
• Synthesis methodology
• Structural inhomogeneity
• Plastic deformation
• Structural relaxation
• Simulation on glass structure
• Nano-crystalline glass ceramics
• Nano-metal glass nanocomposites
• Plasmon based nanophotonic glass
• Technological applications
Keywords: glass, amorphous, nanostructure, nanocomposites, glass ceramics, nanocrystalline
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
