Glasses: recent advances to understand a long-used material

Though glassmaking can be traced back to 3000 BCE, with evidence that naturally occurring glass was used as a tool even earlier, a basic understanding of many aspects of the material remains elusive due to the complex disordered nature of glass at the microscopic scale that causes properties to evolve over time. Beatrice Ruta, scientific researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), has dedicated her career to revealing the complex dynamics of glasses, today combining expertise together with a broad range of complementary laboratory and synchrotron-based experimental techniques at the Institut Néel – a research center jointly supported by the CNRS and Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA) – and the European Synchrotron (ESRF).