In this fascinating blog post, we go behind the scenes to explore the groundbreaking work of materials scientist Takeshi Egami as he questions all that is known and reveals the intricate atomic structure in metallic glass and other liquids. Egami’s quest read like a scientific bildungsroman, from his Copernican-like realizations to his dogged determination to convert colleagues to accept cosmological realities.
Defying the Conventional Wisdom
Credit: Pennsylvania State University Takeshi Egami has spent his career uncovering the atomic structure of metallic glass and liquid for decades. As with Copernicus before him, much of the scientific community resisted Raichle’s ideas—they went against the prevailing wisdom on these substances.
The atoms in ccrystallineolids are locked into a single, rigid framework, while the liquid and glass diverge from this pattern of perfect alignment, resembling the tapioca pearls in boba tea shaken loose from their ordered structure. Egami’s novel method is not tied to traditional bottom-up modelling, which has always made him nervous since the materials are unstable and chaotic.
Instead, Egami has been seeking a higher-level view of things that take in the complex relationships and dynamics that exist in these non-crystalline systems. This journey took him to discover such groundbreaking information, as the dynamic atomic correlations in water that eluded science for so long.
Unveiling the Density Wave Theory
Egami’s distaste for the bottom-up approach has led him to introduce a new way of thinking about medium-range order that might explain viscosity and deformation in liquids and glasses. This discovery opened the door for the density wave theory, a proposal that shows an additional view of how bottom-up and top-down happen in tandem.
Egami and colleagues can study these density waves in the atomic structure using advanced techniques such as synchrotron x-rays and neutron scattering. Once dismissed as an insignificant blip in the data, these ripples have emerged as a key signature of the behaviour of liquids and glasses.
The density wave theory has important implications because it inverts the conventional understanding of what these materials are and also points toward a novel way in which to analyze complex systems (in particular, those found in fields like materials science and condensed matter physics). These results discovered by Egami may open up both new properties and applications of metallic glass, and noncrystalline materials overall.
Conclusion
As an example of the power of scientific inquiry and attempting to learn universal truths in this cosmic truth, it seems like a journey driven by considerable efforts made to expose the secrets behind metallic glass and other liquids as Takeshi Egami sheds light on his work. Similarly to Copernicus, Egami has been met with scepticism from the scientific community, however, his refusal to accept current paradigms has resulted in paradigm-shifting discoveries that may hold wide-ranging ramifications. Backed by the density wave theory and his fledgeling medium-range order hypothesis, Egami has a unique opportunity to break through the metallic glass barrier and inspire a new cohort of materials scientists to reconsider what can be achieved.
