Résumé
Glasses are materials that are ubiquitous in our daily life. We find them in such diverse items as window pans, optical fibers, computer chips, ceramics, all of which are oxide glasses, as well as in food, foams, polymers, gels, which are mainly of organic nature. Roughly speaking glasses are solid materials that have no translational or orientational order on the scale beyond O(10) diameters of the constituent particles (atoms, colloids, …) [1]. Note that these materials are not necessarily homogeneous since, e.g., alkali-glasses such as Na2O-SiO2 show (disordered!) structural features on the length scale of 6–10 Å (compare to the interatomic distance of 1–2 Å) and gels can have structural inhomogeneities that extend up to macroscopic length scales.