Someone get Apple on the line; either some generation of smartphones far removed from now could have the thinnest glass cover you ever did see or, perhaps, Apple's to-be-built "donut" campus could benefit a bit from the latest discovery by researchers at Cornell University and Germany's University of Ulm.

According to a bit of research that was published in the American Chemical Society in 2012, but unearthed fairly recently as a result of the find making it into the Guinness Book of World Records, scientists have managed to come up with a sheet of glass that's all of one molecule thick. Better yet, the find was a complete accident on the part of the researchers, who weren't actually looking to break any records in glass construction at the time of the discovery.

The glass itself measures all of two atoms in thickness, giving it a somewhat unusual bendable property  "much more flexible than regular glass," described Cornell University professor David Mueller in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. Mueller runs the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science, and it was in one of his labs where the discovery occurred.

The scientists were attempting to make graphene at the time, and have postulated that an air leak within the quartz furnace they were using caused its copper foils to react with the quartz. This ultimately produced a layer of "muck," as they first described it, on top of the graphene itself.

Closer inspection  via electron microscope  revealed that the muck's structure was "like a cartoon of the structure of glass in an undergraduate textbook," Muller said, in reference to the fact that no researcher has actually been able to construct glass thin enough to be able to view its underlying structure before.

That's the result of glass being so annoyingly complex at its core: millions of atoms overlapping everywhere when viewed through a powerful microscope, which made assessing its raw structure rather impossible. As it turns out, said structure matched what was postulated back in 1932 by physicist W.H. Zachariasen  an illustration of which that we've used for this article's image, if you'll look above and to the left.

"This is the work that, when I look back at my career, I will be most proud of," said Muller, in an interview with the Cornell Chronicle's Anne Ju. "It's the first time that anyone has been able to see the arrangement of atoms in a glass."

As for the technological hook, it's possible that this ultra-thin glass discovery could someday make its home within the transistors that power your computers and smartphones. Or, better yet, your mobile devices' batteries.

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