Raegen Adam N, Yin Junjie, Zhou Qi, Forrest James A
Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Nat Mater. 2020 Oct;19(10):1110-1113. doi: 10.1038/s41563-020-0723-7. Epub 2020 Jul 6.
Stable glasses prepared by vapour deposition are an analogue of glassy materials aged for geological timescales. The ability to prepare such materials allows the study of near-ideal glassy systems. We report the preparation and characterization of stable glasses of polymers prepared by physical vapour deposition. By controlling the substrate temperature, deposition rate and polydispersity, we prepared and characterized a variety of stable polymer glasses. These materials display the kinetic stability, low fictive temperatures and high-density characteristic of stable glasses. Extrapolation of the measured transformation times between the stable and normal glass provides estimates of the relaxation times of the equilibrium supercooled liquid at temperatures as much as 30 K below the glass transition temperature. These results demonstrate that polymer stable glasses are an exciting and powerful tool in the study of ultrastable glass and disordered materials in general.
通过气相沉积制备的稳定玻璃是经过地质时间尺度老化的玻璃材料的类似物。制备此类材料的能力使得对近乎理想的玻璃态系统的研究成为可能。我们报告了通过物理气相沉积制备的聚合物稳定玻璃的制备及表征。通过控制基板温度、沉积速率和多分散性，我们制备并表征了多种稳定的聚合物玻璃。这些材料展现出稳定玻璃的动力学稳定性、低虚构温度和高密度特性。对稳定玻璃态与正常玻璃态之间测量得到的转变时间进行外推，可估算出在比玻璃化转变温度低达30 K的温度下平衡过冷液体的弛豫时间。这些结果表明，聚合物稳定玻璃是研究超稳定玻璃及一般无序材料的一种令人兴奋且强大的工具。
