Amorphous structures: A local analysis

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
After a short review of different ways of building amorphous structures, a new way, derived from the minimization of the total free energy is described. The comparison between different structures is made by means of the analysis of several parameters: pair distribution function, radial distribution function, planar cuts, and density. Our results confirm the quality of this new model and its tractibility. This enables us to study local atomic symmetries of amorphous structures by numbering the holes of this network as a function of their sizes and by classifying the calculated crystalline fields and elasticity coefficients according to the ‘‘strength’’ of their symmetries. Large holes of diameter 0.85 and 0.72 atomic diameter are found and are shown to be responsible for low energy hopping levels, which are characteristic of glassy structures. The analysis of the local symmetry shows a nearly continuous variation and the abundance of strong dissymmetries, i.e., a distribution of low energy electronic levels as well as strong magnetic anisotropies.

This publication has 14 references indexed in Scilit: