• Define the research topic in such a way that it is clear that the network will address real current problems or scientific issues.
• Inform about the wider relevance of the Action (why is it desirable to launch it as COST Action).
• Explain why COST, which funds only networking and capacity-building activities and not research, is the best mechanism for support. State reasons why COST seems to offer the appropriate framework for the Action, compared to other research frameworks such as ESF, ESA, EUREKA! or the EU Framework Programme.
• Describe the advantages or benefits which should arise from carrying out your project within the COST framework.

Behind the scientific and technological revolutions that have changed our lives so dramatically in the last fifty years lie many advances in the design and fabrication of new materials. And behind these advances lie fundamental studies which have allowed us to understand how certain macroscopic properties – thermodynamic, magnetic, or mechanical – can be controlled via material formulation and processing. The tremendous progress made in the twentieth century in semi-conductor industries and aeronautics, for example, follows on from theoretical breakthroughs in solid-state physics regarding our understanding of the crystalline state.

But most solids are not crystalline. In fact, most of the materials involved in the challenges lying ahead of us – on environmental, industrial, and biological/medical issues – are amorphous, i.e. non-crystalline. Examples range from pastes or foams or gels, through polymeric glasses (as used in e.g. DVD disks), to optical or window glasses, and most recently metallic glasses. Many future technological developments, e.g. concerning low energy-loss power transformers (metallic glasses), highly-transparent fibres for communications, medical implants with enhanced wear resistance (glassy carbon), or low-CO2-impact cements, rely on being able to formulate new amorphous materials with designed mechanical and thermodynamic properties.

Material design and the optimization of fabrication processes require the ability to perform a series of modelling steps extending over a large range of length scales: from atomic interactions, to mesoscale structure which needs to be represented such as to account for heterogeneities in the material, to macroscopic behaviour. In amorphous materials, this research process is limited by huge gaps of knowledge concerning the most elementary physical mechanisms: because of the lack of periodicity that would be present in a crystal, there are no easily identifiable defects – analogous to crystalline dislocations – which are responsible for plastic deformation.

Scientific progress on these issues depends on meaningful comparisons between amorphous materials of different compositions (see B.2 below), on systematic confrontation between experimental results and theories, and ultimately on the development of scientific interactions between communities (mechanical engineers, rheologists, physicists, materials and polymer scientists,…) that have little history of cross-interaction and have often developed different languages to talk about closely related phenomena.

The fragmentation of the community working on amorphous materials is particularly severe in Europe, as opposed to the US, where interdisciplinary programmes have been very active for decades. Indeed it was striking at the COST Strategic Workshop where the Action was conceived that all the attending US professors had expertise in multiple fields (in colloidal/metallic, or polymeric/colloidal glasses, for example) while the European communities working on colloidal, polymeric and metallic glasses were very separated and had difficulties in finding a common language.

Finally, while the scientific study (both basic research and industrial research) of amorphous solids is relatively well advanced in France, UK and Germany, this very important subject is much less developed in the rest of the EU. Remedying this is all the more critical as the subject is evolving quite fast. There is an important educational need here, for both young and senior researchers in related fields.

Amorphous materials can be classified into two main categories: “hard glasses”, characterized by large elastic moduli, which comprise oxide, polymeric or metallic glasses; and “soft glasses” comprising foams, colloidal suspensions, emulsions, etc. Because these materials are quite diverse in composition, studies in the field have traditionally been carried out by many different communities – metallurgists, rheologists, polymer scientists – delineated by the expertise needed to fabricate and investigate these systems experimentally. Plasticity and rheology, which investigate the flow behaviour hard and soft glasses respectively, are often seen as two separate research fields. But observations are now showing more and more clearly that plasticity and rheology may, in fact, be two sides of the same coin.

Indeed, what is particularly striking about amorphous materials is that despite huge differences in composition, they share an array of extremely similar macroscopic properties, such as ageing (a slow evolution of materials properties), or certain transitions between various flow regimes (Newtonian to non-Newtonian, homogeneous to non-homogeneous flow). These same features can be found in systems as disparate as metallic glasses and colloidal pastes, and it is now agreed that such similarities are not accidental, but reflect a profound physical reality. The macroscopic response of glasses must be determined by a limited set of physical mechanisms, all of which relate to their common character: structural disorder.

The problem is that identifying generic mechanisms and establishing clear links between the disordered micro-structure and the macroscopic behaviour is extremely challenging. The tremendous progress made in the 20th century in the study of crystals was possible only because the periodic structure permitted analytical calculations and facilitated the development of experimental techniques (such as those based on diffraction) that gave access to microscopic information. In glasses, the absence of periodic structure – which is precisely the common feature of all glasses – raises enormous difficulties for experiments and for analytical theories.

In the absence of micro-structural theories, much of the classical work on elasto-plastic dynamics could not be firmly based on microscopic observations; rather it had to rely on phenomenological relations based primarily on symmetry, but with many fit parameters. This works for well-known, tabulated materials, but is not predictive, hence cannot guide advanced applications. Every new material must be tested again before a reliable description can be constructed to predict its behaviour. The lack of unifying theory also explains why research on amorphous materials has evolved quite independently in different communities. Mechanical engineers and material scientists – in response to demands from industry – must construct phenomenological descriptions of the response to deformation of specific materials. By contrast, physicists have in the past essentially focussed on the relaxation properties of glasses in the absence of external stress, during cooling through the glass transition, but little has been done on the physics of deformation.

The physical study of deformation in amorphous materials is therefore an emerging research field with huge potential impact in technology. The area is now evolving rapidly. New experimental methods have been invented, while computing power has reached a level where meaningful simulations can be envisaged. This provides much needed access to the elementary mechanisms of deformation in amorphous materials and creates a situation when predictive theories can finally emerge.

This Action is absolutely novel for research, not only in Europe, but also in the world. It arises from the recognition by scientists from Physics, Mechanical Engineering, and Material Science that they face the same set of problems. Never before have researchers from across these communities decided to join their efforts on such a scale, to target the core problems which have so far prevented a fundamental breakthrough on the physical origin of the mechanical and thermodynamic properties of amorphous (glassy) materials.

• Summarise the previous research in the field of the proposal.
• Describe the current state of the art, including relevant research within the EU Framework Programmes and other EU fora, comparison of EU research with that in other parts of the world.
• Explain how the Action will be innovative in addressing either a new problem or a new approach to an existing problem.

• Reasons for launching the Action, indicating the need for an experts network in the area and the added value of the Action networking. Emphasise immediate and future benefits and envisaged applications (understandable for non-specialists readers).
• Indicate whether the Action is mainly aimed at European economic/societal needs, or at scientific/technological advance, or both.
• Clearly distinguish between objectives, expected results and the means that are needed to achieve them. The impact of COST comes from concrete outcomes, not just activity; so indicate how the Action will aim for maximally productive outcomes.

Since it is not possible to observe experimentally all aspects of material deformation at different scales in one and the same material (e.g. metallic glass), prominent steps have come from daring analogies, e.g. between the flow of foams and metallic glasses. Moreover, as the phenomena observed and some physical mechanisms are now emerging as likely to be identical or very similar, the lack of communication between communities working on amorphous materials have lead to a tremendous lack of efficiency due to duplication of effort.

As a consequence, fundamental progress in understanding amorphous materials, which today is within reach, depends on a concerted collective effort involving cross-interactions between several communities (mechanical engineers, metallurgists, rheologists, physicists, …) that have evolved separately for decades.

With a focus on the mechanical response, this Action will bring together European scientists who contribute to the identification of links between macroscopic properties and the microstructural processes in amorphous materials. It will produce predictive theories and constitutive equations which are based on meaningful physical representations of the underlying processes, and will promote interactions between theorists and experimentalists so as to facilitate the formulation and design of new materials.

There is also a matching demand from industry, as glasses are important materials for advanced applications. Research on these topics can then have a direct impact on technological progress in material processing and forming, in the control of strength and durability and, in the end, in the design of new materials. The potential benefits of this Action are thus enormous.

• Relevant links to and complementarity with any current and/or planned European research projects, such as ESF, FP, EUREKA! (bear in mind that avoiding duplication is one of the goals of COST)
• Blurb from COST web site may be useful: COST – together with EUREKA and the EU framework programmes – is one of the three pillars of joint European research initiatives. These three complementary structures have differing areas of research. COST has clearly shown its strength in non-competitive research [do we fall under this heading?], pre-normative cooperation, and solving environmental, cross-border and public utility problems. It has been successfully used to maximise European synergy and added value in research cooperation and is a useful tool to further European integration.
• EUREKA R&D is [quote from their web site] industry-led, applied, close-to-market so wouldn't be suitable for what we're doing here
• Saying why ESF schemes wouldn't have worked for us is harder - an ESF network would provide essentially the same networking facilities. Maybe we need to stress the point that COST is very open to new members joining an action (but also the ESF may have something similar)

COST is ideal for the proposed Action because the key need is not to provide more funding to existing research groups, but to link up existing activities so that all synergies are fully exploited and new ideas generated. Ease of access for institutions from non-EU member countries also makes COST very appropriate, and will help to link European research under the Action to the international research context

The Action does not duplicate research efforts funded under other European mechanisms. ESF have suspended the application process for both Networks and EuroCore programmes (apparently to avoid overlap of function with other agencies) so funding from them would not be an option. A related ESF programme, Simbioma, addresses wide ranging topics in simulation of materials (including biomaterials), but glasses form only a small part. There is also the Comploids EU-FP7 programme, which focusses on colloidal dynamics but has no link to conventional glasses, and SoftComp, a former Network of Excellence also addressing colloids but which has expired and is now self-financing. Finally, the SPHINX (statistical physics of glassy and nonequilibrium systems) network was a successful ESF network but this ended in 2004 and there has been no direct successor involving work on structural glasses, or exploiting the significant synergies that this Action will be able to generate by broadening the view to include a range of different classes of amorphous materials.