Towards glasses with permanent stability

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates through simulations that suppressing volume fraction inhomogeneities in glasses prevents devitrification, leading to ultra-stable, mechanically stabilized glasses with potential industrial applications.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel method of mechanical homogenization to prevent devitrification in glasses, providing a new physical principle for glass stabilization.

Findings

Suppression of volume fraction inhomogeneities prevents devitrification.

Mechanical homogenization leads to ultra-stable glasses.

Homogenized glasses resist structural relaxation over aging time scales.

Abstract

Unlike crystals, glasses age or devitrify over time, reflecting their non-equilibrium nature. This lack of stability is a serious issue in many industrial applications. Here, we show by numerical simulations that the devitrification of quasi-hard-sphere glasses is prevented by suppressing volume fraction inhomogeneities. A monodisperse glass known to devitrify with `avalanche'-like intermittent dynamics is subjected to small iterative adjustments to particle sizes to make the local volume fractions spatially uniform. We find that this entirely prevents structural relaxation and devitrification over aging time scales, even in the presence of crystallites. There is a dramatic homogenization in the number of load-bearing nearest neighbors each particle has, indicating that ultra-stable glasses may be formed via `mechanical homogenization'. Our finding provides a physical principle for glass stabilization and opens a novel route to the formation of mechanically stabilized glasses.