Historically and currently, soda lime silicate is the most common type of glass used globally, serving as the windows and bottles surrounding us in everyday life. While alternative glass compositions sometimes made an appearance throughout the centuries,¹ the emergence and reliance on specialized glasses did not become prevalent until the end of the 19^th century with the development of borate glasses.

Borate glasses contain boron oxide (B2O₃) as one of their main network formers. The boron and oxygen atoms can take two possible arrangements—either a planar trigonal BO₃ unit or a 3D tetrahedral BO4 unit. The relative concentrations of these arrangements relate to different glass properties, such as the glass transition temperature.^2,3