Month: March 2016

In the coming five years, our group will be backed by the European Research Council through an ERC Consolidator Grant won by Lothar. The project "UTOPES" challenges today's engineering concepts for the generation of glassy materials towards the conception of new tools in glass processing. For that, melt deposition, isothermal deposition from liquid phases, and gas-phase deposition of non-crystalline materials will be treated - within the class of inorganic glasses - in a generalist approach, unified by the understanding that glass formation represents the only strict deviation from self-organization, and that, hence, the evolution of structural complexity in glassy materials can be tailored on any length-scale through adequate processing. Providing a topological scheme for the quantification and chemical tailoring of structural complexity, UTOPES will answer to the challenge of finding order in disorder, and will thus break the grounds for the third generation of glasses with properties beyond what is presently thought of as the limits of physical engineering. Link to press...