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Amorphous materials are coming within reach of realistic computer simulations, but new approaches are needed to fully understand their intricate atomic structures. Here, we show how machine-learning (ML)-based techniques can give new,…
The structure of amorphous silicon (a-Si) has been studied for decades. The two main theories are based on a continuous random network and on a `paracrystalline' model, respectively -- the latter being defined as showing localized…
Amorphous silicon (a-Si) models are analyzed for structural, electronic and vibrational characteristics. Several models of various sizes have been computationally fabricated for this analysis. It is shown that a recently developed…
We present new atomistic models of amorphous silicon (a-Si) and hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) surfaces. The a-Si model included 4096 atoms and was obtained using local orbital density functional theory. By analyzing a slab model…
In the In recent times, the research community has explored diverse structures and novel fabrication methods for amorphous solids. This work investigates structural trends among different classes of amorphous materials to identify universal…
The structural relaxation of amorphous materials is described as arising from the superposition of elementary processes with varying activation energies. We show that it is possible to obtain the kinetic parameters of these processes from…
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,…
Localized basis ab initio molecular dynamics simulation within the density functional framework has been used to generate realistic configurations of amorphous silicon carbide (a-SiC). Our approach consists of constructing a set of smart…
Several amorphous silicon structures were generated using a classical molecular dynamics (MD) protocol of melting and quenching with different quenching rates. An analysis of the calculated electronic properties of these structures revealed…
We present an information-based total-energy optimization method to produce nearly defect-free structural models of amorphous silicon. Using geometrical, structural and topological information from disordered tetrahedral networks, we have…
The structural and electronic properties of amorphous silicon ($a$-Si) are investigated by first-principles calculations based on the density-functional theory (DFT), focusing on the intrinsic structural defects. By simulated melting and…
Structurally disordered materials continue to pose fundamental questions, including that of how different disordered phases ("polyamorphs") can coexist and transform from one to another. As a widely studied case, amorphous silicon (a-Si)…
The structure of amorphous silicon is widely thought of as a fourfold-connected random network, and yet it is defective atoms, with fewer or more than four bonds, that make it particularly interesting. Despite many attempts to explain such…
This paper presents a large-scale $ab$ $initio$ simulation study of amorphous silicon hydride ($a$-Si$_{\text{1-x}}$H$_{\text{x}}$) with an emphasis on the structure and properties of the material across a range of hydrogen concentration by…
We apply a new method "force enhanced atomic refinement" (FEAR) to create a computer model of amorphous silicon (a-Si), based upon the highly precise X-ray diffraction experiments of Laaziri et al. The logic underlying our calculation is to…
A novel approach to predict the atomic densities of amorphous materials is explored on the basis of Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics (CPMD) in density functional theory. Despite that determination of the atomic density of matter is crucial…
Preparing realistic atom-scale models of amorphous silicon (a-Si) is a decades-old condensed matter physics challenge. Herein, we combine the Activation Relaxation Technique nouveau (ARTn) to a Moment Tensor Potential (MTP) to generate…
Amorphous materials are solids that lack long-range atomic order but possess complex short- and medium-range order. Unlike crystalline materials that can be described by unit cells containing few up to hundreds of atoms, amorphous materials…
Understanding how atomic-level structures govern the mechanical properties of amorphous materials remains a fundamental challenge in solid-state physics. Under mechanical loading, amorphous materials exhibit simple affine and spatially…
This paper addresses a difficult inverse problem that involves the reconstruction of a three-dimensional model of tetrahedral amorphous semiconductors via inversion of diffraction data. By posing the material-structure determination as a…