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Intermetallics, which encompass a wide range of compounds, often exhibit similar or closely related crystal structures, resulting in various intermetallic systems with structurally derivative phases. This study examines the hypothesis that…
Review paper on computer simulations of the structure of amorphous silica.
Transparent glass-ceramics are nanocomposite materials which offer specific characteristics of capital importance in photonics. This kind of two-phase materials is constituted by nanocrystals embedded in a glass matrix and the respective…
Bismuth displays puzzling superconducting properties. In its crystalline equilibrium phase, it does not seem to superconduct at accessible low temperatures. However, in the amorphous phase it displays superconductivity at ~ 6 K. Under…
Colloidal model systems allow for a flexible tuning of particle sizes, particle spacings and mutual interactions at constant temperature. Colloidal suspensions typically crystallize as soon as the interactions get sufficiently strong and…
Metallic glass is a frozen liquid with structural disorder that retains degenerate free energy without spontaneous symmetry breaking to become a solid. For over half a century, this puzzling structure has raised fundamental questions about…
Conventional drying of colloidal materials and gels (including cement) can lead to detrimental effects due to the buildup of internal stresses as water evaporates from the nano/microscopic pores. However, the underlying nanoscopic…
Despite the use of glasses for thousands of years, the nature of the glass transition is still mysterious. On approaching the glass transition, the growth of dynamic heterogeneity has long been thought to play a key role in explaining the…
Glass is an under-cooled liquid that very slowly relaxes towards the equilibrium crystalline state. Its energy balance is ill understood, since it is widely believed that the glassy state cannot be described thermodynamically. However, the…
The silicon-hydrogen system is of key interest for solar-cell devices, including both crystalline and amorphous modifications. Elemental amorphous Si is now well understood, but the atomic-scale effects of hydrogenating the silicon matrix…
The original electronic structure of the Pb$^{2+}$ ion explains its particular structural role in crystalline phases and silicate glasses. After a description of the structural role of lead in crystalline phases (PbO, silicates), this…
The structure of amorphous materials has been debated since the 1930's as a binary question: amorphous materials are either Zachariasen continuous random networks (Z-CRNs) or Z-CRNs containing crystallites. It was recently demonstrated,…
Is every product system of Hilbert spaces over a semigroup $P$ concrete, i.e. isomorphic to the product system of an $E_0$-semigroup over $P$? The answer, in general, is no. We record a non-example when $P$ is cancellative and is not…
Glasses are featured with a disordered amorphous structure, being opposite to crystals that are constituted by periodic lattices. In this study we report that the exceptional thermodynamic and kinetic stability of an ultra-stable binary…
The concept of a supersolid state is paradoxical. It combines the crystallization of a many-body system with dissipationless flow of the atoms it is built of. This quantum phase requires the breaking of two continuous symmetries, the phase…
We study the phase ordering dynamics of a two dimensional model colloidal solid using molecular dynamics simulations. The colloid particles interact with each other with a Hamaker potential modified by the presence of equatorial "patches"…
There exists a variety of theories of the glass transition and many more numerical models. But because the models need built-in complexity to prevent crystallization, comparisons with theory can be difficult. We study the dynamics of a…
Supersolidity of glasses is explained as a property of an unusual state of condensed matter. This state is essentially different from both normal and superfluid solid states. The mechanism of the phenomenon is the transfer of mass by…
Recent theories predict that when a supercooled liquid approaches the glass transition, particle clusters with a special "amorphous order" nucleate within the liquid, which lead to static correlations dictating the dramatic slowdown of…
The molecular structures of amorphous silica and crystalline quartz are used to predict their intrinsic strength and fracture toughness together with the theoretical strength of silicon dioxide. At the atomic scale, the amorphous silica is…