Guinness record: World's thinnest glass is just two
atoms thick
At just a molecule thick, it's a new record: The
world's thinnest sheet of glass, a serendipitous discovery by scientists at
Cornell and Germany's University of Ulm, is recorded for posterity in the
Guinness Book of World Records.
The work that
describes direct imaging of this thin glass was first published in January 2012
in Nano Letters, and the Guinness records officials took note. The
record will now be published in the Guinness World Records 2014 Edition.
Just two
atoms in thickness, the glass was an accidental discovery, Muller said. The
scientists had been making graphene, a two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms in a chicken wire crystal
formation, on copper foils in a quartz furnace. They noticed some "muck"
on the graphene, and upon further inspection, found it to be composed of the
elements of everyday glass, silicon and oxygen.
They
concluded that an air leak had caused the copper to react with the quartz, also
made of silicon and oxygen. This produced the glass layer on the would-be pure
graphene.
Besides its
sheer novelty, Muller said, the work answers an 80-year-old question about the
fundamental structure of glass. Scientists, with no way to directly see it, had
struggled to understand it: it behaves like a solid, but was thought to look
more like a liquid. Now, the Cornell scientists have produced a picture of
individual atoms of glass, and they found that it strikingly resembles a
diagram drawn in 1932 by W.H. Zachariasen – a longstanding theoretical
representation of the arrangement of atoms in glass.
"This is
the work that, when I look back at my career, I will be most proud of,"
Muller said. "It's the first time that anyone has been able to see the
arrangement of atoms in a glass."
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