World's Thinnest Glass Created Accidentally By Researchers In U.S., Germany

Researchers accidentally discovered the world's thinnest sheet of glass, just two atoms thick.

Their chance finding — now immortalized in the 2014 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, out this week — gives scientists a glimpse into the puzzling properties of glass, which behaves like both a solid and a liquid.

Researchers at Cornell University and Germany's University of Ulm were creatinggraphene, one of the thinnest and strongest materials in the world. Sheets of graphene are just one carbon atom thick, with those atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice. [Gallery of Wonders: The Weirdest World Records]

Using an electron microscope, the researchers inspected some "muck" on the graphene, finding that it was essentially a 2D sheet of common glass, made up of silicon and oxygen atoms.

The glass layer likely was created when an air leak caused copper foils, which are involved in the graphene-making process, to react with a furnace made up quartz, a mineral that is comprised of silicon and oxygen, the researchers say.

The researchers' observations were first described in January 2012 in the journal Nano Letters. They say their microscopic photos of the ultra-thin pane may help to solve some long-standing uncertainties about glass, which is not exactly a liquid or a solid.