What Stresses Gorilla Glass Makes It Stronger

Image source - http://www.connectedrogers.ca/news/ask-an-expert-gorilla-glass/

In a journal article for Physical Review Letters, Thomas Voigtmann and his colleagues explored the reasons why glass retains a 'memory' of its production process when the glass hardens, something that we touch upon in the summer workshops when we talk about tempered glass (as especially well explained in the Prince Rupert's drops video - previously blogged about here).

I appreciate the comment in the summary article from InsideScience.org that states that

Voigtmann and his coauthors describe glass's residual stress in physics terms, by observing how the motion of individual atoms affects the entire complex system. But engineers are already taking advantage of glass's history dependence—no theoretical physics required.

The article goes on to explain the process of producing Gorilla Glass - hardening in a bath of molten potassium salts - and why this produces a remarkably hard, durable glass.