Disordered materials can transform into crystals in drastically distinct ways

What is it about?

"Glasses" are solids with the disordered structure of a liquid. When met with the right stimulus, they can rapidly transform into a crystal, much faster than you would expect in a liquid. In this work, we looked at glasses at very low temperature, and showed that they can transform into crystals either by an "ultra-fast" route or a slower, intermittent, "avalanche" route, even at the same density and temperature, depending on how "mechanically" stable they are.

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Why is it important?

Amorphous materials are in wide circulation in industry, whether in ceramics, pharmaceuticals or optical components. Properties such as transparency, solubility, and physical resilience over time largely depend on materials keeping their disordered structure; when they crystallize, the original properties may change unpredictably. That's why it's important to understand how disordered solids transform into ordered ones, and how we might design them to be more resilient.