Oxide glasses continue to be among the most important materials for a sustainable society owing to their unique advantages, e.g., transparency, formability, low cost, and tailorable properties and functionalities. However, their high brittleness has severely been hindering the use of oxide glasses for many engineering and functional applications. Previous approaches to overcome this limitation by improving the fracture toughness have largely failed, but herein we report the use of a simple post-treatment, namely surface aging in a humid atmosphere, to improve not the resistance to crack growth, but rather the resistance to crack initiation. The effect of such aging on the mechanical performance is found to be highly composition dependent, and in stark contrast to most previous work, we thus find that water incorporation is not always a foe, but can also be a friend for glass mechanics. Specifically, we demonstrate crack-free ultrasharp cube corner indents in an aged caesium aluminoborate glass at loads above 25 N, while other aged oxide glasses studied in this work easily crack at loads below 1 N. The aging effect is found to be due to a combination of stress and hydrolysis assisted structural changes in the flexible aluminoborate glass network.

中文翻译：

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通过潮湿老化实现玻璃的超高抗裂性

氧化物玻璃由于其独特的优势（例如透明性，可成型性，低成本以及可定制的特性和功能）而继续成为可持续发展社会最重要的材料之一。然而，它们的高脆性严重阻碍了氧化物玻璃在许多工程和功能应用中的使用。通过改善断裂韧性克服该限制的先前方法在很大程度上失败了，但是在此我们报道了使用简单的后处理方法，即在潮湿的气氛中进行表面老化，以不提高抗裂纹扩展性，而是提高抗裂纹性。裂纹萌生。发现这种时效对机械性能的影响高度依赖于成分，并且与大多数以前的工作形成鲜明对比的是，我们因此发现水的掺入并不总是敌人，但也可以成为玻璃技工的朋友。具体而言，我们证明了老化的铝硼酸铯玻璃在25 N以上的载荷下无裂纹的超锐利的立体角凹痕，而在这项工作中研究的其他老化的氧化物玻璃在1 N以下的载荷下也容易开裂。发现老化的原因是由于应力和水解的结合有助于柔性铝硼酸盐玻璃网络的结构变化。