Glasses inherent instability

Kinloch, Dukes and Gledhill [73] describe the use of an epoxide adhesive to bond glass to glass in the Churchill Memorial Screen at Dudley, informing us that Within a few months of completion and erection in the open, pieces of glass began to fall off, confirming the thermodynamic prediction of inherent instability . 

One of the major problems associated with poled polymer films is their inherent thermodynamic instability the chromophores in the polymer matrix tend to relax with time, eventually leading to a centrosymmetric system. Methods to circumvent this problem include crosslinking and the use of polymers with very high glass transition temperatures. 

It turned out that this instability is not an artifact of the method employed, but it represents an inherent difficulty of the spin-glass problem, and its study has pointed the way to the essential physics. 

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