Ideally Glassy Hydrogen Bonded Networks

TL;DR

This paper extends the axiomatic theory of ideally glassy networks to include hydrogen-bonded systems like glycerol, glucose, and trehalose, providing insights into their molecular structure and stability over long time scales.

Contribution

It broadens the theory of glassy networks to hydrogen-bonded materials, integrating Lagrangian mechanics and Maxwellian scaffolds for molecular-level analysis.

Findings

Hydrogen-bonded networks can be described using constraint counting methods.

Trehalose forms extensible tandem sandwich arrays in its glassy state.

Network properties vary significantly over different time scales, from picoseconds to cosmological durations.

Abstract

The axiomatic theory of ideally glassy networks, which has proved effective in describing phase diagrams and properties of chalcogenide and oxide glasses and their foreign interfaces, is broadened here to include intermolecular interactions in hydrogen-bonded polyalcohols such as glycerol, monosaccharides (glucose), and the optimal bioprotective hydrogen-bonded disaccharide networks formed from trehalose. The methods of Lagrangian mechanics and Maxwellian scaffolds are useful at the molecular level when bonding hierarchies are characterized by constraint counting similar to the chemical methods used by Huckel and Pauling. Whereas Newtonian molecular dynamical methods are useful for simulating large-scale interactions for times of order 10 ps, constraint counting describes network properties on glassy (almost equilibrated) time scales, which may be of cosmological order for oxide glasses, or years for trehalose. The ideally glassy network of trehalose may consist of extensible tandem sandwich arrays.