New method measures nanoscale material response at high magnification

The safety glass used in the windshields of limousines and military vehicles needs to be hard, strong and shatter-proof, but also thin—both for visibility and to reduce its weight, a particularly important feature for aerospace vehicles. The use of a promising new transparent ceramic spinel that could replace traditional layered safety glass was the motivation for recent research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that resulted in a new method to measure changes that occur in materials, such as glasses, at the nanoscale.