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The recent commercial success of foldable smartphones is indebted in part to integration of ultra-thin glass (UTG) into the flexible display modules. To endow glass with such a foldability, while keeping its merits over polymeric materials, tons of complicated issues need to be resolved in addition to thickness reduction. Since UTG is subjected to repeated deformations during its service as a flexible cover window, extra care is required to minimize microcracks during the whole preparation process. Here, it is noteworthy that chemical strengthening via ion exchange should be performed to UTG for better durability. In this article, after briefly reviewing the current status of UTG in terms of production and process, its chemical strengthening is highlighted as a viable option to further innovate its functionalities. A new ion-exchange technique which is not adopting the molten-salt-bath is proposed, and some experimental demonstrations exemplifying the concept of ‘actively stress-managed glass’ are delineated.

No abstract

As for an optically homogeneous glass with thickness tantamount to a few millimeters, the longer wavelength side of its optical transmission window normally takes shape as a result of multiphonon absorption. Mainly due to the complexity inherent in glass structures, a quantitative numerical assessment of the vibrational spectrum of a given glass composition is normally not a simple task. The conspicuously dissimilar infrared transmission edges between oxide and halide glasses, for example, can be understood qualitatively in terms of the Szigeti relation; however, the relatively insignificant but clearly distinguishable changes in infrared transmission edge resulting from compositional modification in a glass‐forming system are lacking a numerical assessment. Herein, it is experimentally verified that the infrared transmission edge of Ge‐based chalcogenide glasses can be correlated in a quantitative manner with their chemical composition through combining their average bond energy and molar mass. Ternary or quaternary chalcogenide glasses exceeding 100 different compositions are used to justify this numerical correlation.