Glass is a very special material: it can be produced in almost unlimited variety from compounds of almost all’elements of the periodic table. The only prerequisite is that the components can be melted together and that the melt is then cooled quickly enough. In the process, the liquid mixture solidifies and forms a glass. "Glass is therefore a frozen liquid," illustrates glass chemist Lothar Wondraczek from the University of Jena. As great as the diversity in composition is, as varied are the properties of the resulting glasses.
For material science, however, this is a problem, because unlike crystalline materials, glass does not have an ordered inner structure. ...
