Related papers: Signatures of paracrystallinity in amorphous silic…
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…
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)…
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,…
Understanding the structural origins of the properties of amorphous materials remains one of the most important challenges in structural science. In this study we demonstrate that local 'structural simplicity', embodied by the degree to…
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…
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…
The anharmonic decay rates of atomic vibrations in amorphous silicon (a-Si) and paracrystalline silicon (p-Si), containing small crystalline grains embedded in a disordered matrix, are calculated using realistic structural models. The…
Locally, the atomic structure in well annealed amorphous silicon appears similar to that of crystalline silicon. We address here the question whether a point defect, specifically a vacancy, in amorphous silicon also resembles that in the…
We have investigated the response of amorphous silicon (a-Si), in particular crystallization, to external mechanical shear deformations using classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and the empirical Environment Dependent Inter-atomic…
Rings comprising chemically bonded atoms are essential topological motifs for the structural ordering of network-forming materials. Quantification of such larger motifs beyond short-range pair correlation is essential for understanding the…
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…
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…
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…
Amorphous silica ($a-SiO_2$) is a widely used inorganic material. Interestingly, the relationship between the local atomic structures of $a-SiO_2$ and their effects on ductility and fracture is seldom explored. Here, we combine large-scale…
We present a computational study of the electronic properties of amorphous SiO2. The ionic configurations used are the ones generated by an earlier molecular dynamics simulations in which the system was cooled with different cooling rates…
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…
We have used tight-binding molecular-dynamics simulations to investigate the role of point defects (vacancies and interstitials) on structural relaxation in amorphous silicon. Our calculations give unambiguous evidence that point defects…
The structure of surfaces and interfaces of silica (SiO2) is investigated by large scale molecular dynamics computer simulations. In the case of a free silica surface, the results of a classical molecular dynamics simulation are compared to…
The structural features of the interface between the cystalline and amorphous phases of Si solid are studied in simulations based on a combination of empirical interatomic potentials and a nonorthogonal tight-binding model. The…