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Dry Ice Made into Super-tough Glass
janus zeal writes "A form of solid carbon dioxide that could be used to make ultra-hard glass or coatings for microelectronic devices has been discovered.
The material, named amorphous carbonia, was created by scientists from the University of Florence in Italy.
Writing in the journal Nature, the team says the material was theoretically possible but had never been created.
It was made by squeezing dry ice, a form of carbon dioxide used to create smoke in stage shows, at huge pressure.
Scientists are interested in the new material because of the potential applications. Also, they believe it could give them clues to the processes that happen in the center of huge gas giant planets such as Jupiter."
I'm not on campus (it's saturday, wee!), so I can't access the original Nature article, but I have a feeling the "stable at room temp" bit was misinterpreted by the BBC writers. I really don't see any practical way to keep the molecules together at room temp and atmospheric pressure - there's a reason CO2 is a gas. Silicon glass is a sort of weird case - most materials that show a glassy transition do it at a much lower temperature, or are largely temperature independent. When people try to run simulations to describe glassy behavior, they generally assume zero-temperature and quenched disorder.
FWIW, I spent the last two years working on computational study of spin glasses, and am working on my PhD in soft condensed matter, of which glasses are a huge part.
With my experience in scientific publications (especially physics!) there is usually a paragraph at the beginning of every paper trying to find some practical application. Probably 50% of these applications are pure horseshit thought up at the last minute. A lot of us do things for the sake of better understanding the world around us, and don't really know if there will be a practical application. And, if there DOES turn out to be an application, it's sometimes something we certainly didn't predict.
I haven't read the Nature article yet, but I have a feeling the "understand a planet and coat lenses" bit was thrown in as fluff to justify the research. It's pretty much accepted practice, and I know I'm not the only one who barely glances at the first paragraph in most papers.
No, it's like glass, except with carbon replacing the silicon.
Aerogel is pretty fricking sweet though. (and for other reasons than the fact that it can float and carry things)
its a great insulator and there are some (carbon?) aeogel's that are conductive of electricity...pretty cool stuff, quite expensive though
Bottles.
Glass doesn't flow either (except in geologic time scales) http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glas s/glass.html
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_120.html
Diamond-like-carbon (DLC) has been used to make scratch resistant plastic for years.
It is either sputtered on or PECVD, applied under vacuum.
It _is_ carbon glass.
It exists already, just not made using the high pressure method the article blathers on about.
but it left his mouth feeling weird
You probably already know this, but that was probably an effect of aerogel being extremely absorbant. If it wasn't so expensive to manufacture, it would probably make an ideal replacement for kitty litter for cleaning up oil spills and the like.
It can be treated to become extremely hydrophobic, though, allowing it to be cut with precision water jet cutters and such.
Eat the rich.
And I felt bad for the poor little kids - they'll never understand even basic level science if the adults in their life encourage them to use faulty logic and reasoning.
Just to be sure: You did realize that whole web site is satire, right?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The way they describe making this stuff -- compressing and heating in a diamond anvil -- is the way they used to make diamond. Then they figured out how to make vapour deposition work well, which is what's scaring DeBeers now.
So the way they're making this stuff is they way they used to make diamonds before they discovered the more practical CVD method. The summary (and the article's) suggestion that they're going to make skyscraper windows out of this stuff is... optimistic. Plus the problem that it sublimates as soon as you take it OUT of the diamond anvil.
You're misunderstanding the use of the word 'stability'. All glasses are thermodynamically unstable. A glass is, essentially, a liquid that has been cooled really quickly past the melting point to a temperature at which the atoms do not have enough energy to re-arrange themselves into the thermodynamically preferred crystalline ordering. This leaves you with a thermodynamically unstable - but kinetically stable - solid that has an amorphous structure (one with no long-range atomic order).
Since this glass is also kinetically unstable, it won't remain a solid at RTP. However, it probably won't explode: it will simply crystallise, melt and evaporate as you heat it up. I suppose if you did this fast enough it might explode, but I think at 'normal' heating rates it's likely to just crack along flaws in the material to relieve internal pressure.
Of course, since you mentioned what would happen when it 'breaks'... this would require it to be at whatever conditions the glass is kinetically stable (from the article) - as I've explained above, the material won't exist as a solid at RTP and therefore cannot be broken. If it's kinetically stable, when it breaks it will just behave like a normal glass: it will fragment.
(And, yes, I am a glass scientist!)