3) Palladium microalloy glass

 It's important to recognize that there are two important properties that all physical materials have: strength, which is how much force it can withstand before it deforms, and toughness, which is how much energy it takes to break or fracture it. Most ceramics are strong but not tough, shattering with vice grips or even when dropped from only a modest height. Elastic materials, like rubber, can hold a lot of energy but are easily deformable, and not strong at all.

Most glassy materials are brittle: strong but not particularly tough. Even reinforced glass, like Pyrex or Gorilla Glass, isn't particularly tough on the scale of materials. But in 2011, researchers developed a new microalloy glass featuring five elements (phosphorous, silicon, germanium, silver and palladium), where the palladium provides a pathway for forming shear bands, allowing the glass to plastically deform rather than crack. It defeats all types of steel, as well as anything lower on this list, for its combination of both strength and toughness. It is the hardest material to not include carbon.

Micrograph of deformed notch in palladium-based metallic glass shows extensive plastic shielding of... [+] an initially sharp crack. Inset is a magnified view of a shear offset (arrow) developed during plastic sliding before the crack opened. Palladium microalloys have the highest combined strength and toughness of any known material.









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