What is it about?
The symbiotic relationship between experiment and simulation is explored by focussing on the structures of liquid and glassy ZnCl2 and GeSe2, and on the structure of glassy GeO2 under pressure. The addressed issues include extended range ordering on a nanometre scale, the formation of homopolar (like-atom) bonds, and the density-driven mechanisms of network collapse.
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Photo by Katerina Pavlyuchkova on Unsplash
Why is it important?
A prerequisite for understanding the properties of glass-forming materials is knowledge about their atomic-scale structure. The desired information is not, however, easy to obtain because of structural disorder. It is therefore important to design experiments that give site-specific information on the structure in order to test the validity of different molecular dynamics models. In turn, once a molecular dynamics scheme contains the correct theoretical ingredients, it can be used both to enrich the information obtained from experiment and to predict the composition and temperature/pressure dependence of a material’s properties, a first step in using the principles of rational design to prepare glasses with novel functional properties.
Perspectives
The development of accurate predictive models for liquids and glasses benefits from a close interaction between experimentalists and theoreticians, enabling the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to be explored and appreciated.
Professor Philip S Salmon
University of Bath
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Atomic-Scale Structure of Network Glass-Forming Materials, January 2015, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-15675-0_1.
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