Fundamentals of glasses

Abstract An increasing interest in amorphous solids has grown not only due to their various technological applications in electronic, electrochemical, magnetic and, optical devices, but also from the point of view of their complexity in structure. Glasses are formed as an amorphous (noncrystalline) solid having short-range order, i.e., there is no periodic arrangement of its molecular constituents. The most important aspect of glass transition is the relaxation process that occurs as the supercooled liquid cools. The configurational changes cause the relaxation of the supercooled liquid and become increasingly slow with decreasing temperature, until at a given temperature (glass transition temperature) the material behaves as a solid. Various structural investigations such as SEM, TEM, XRD, FT-IR, FESEM, etc. and optical study such as UV-visible have been carried out on different types of glass nanocomposites to explore their various properties.