Related papers: Identification of relaxation and diffusion mechani…
At low temperatures, dynamics in amorphous silicon occurs through a sequence of discrete activated events that locally reorganize the topological network. Using the activation-relaxation technique, a data base containing over 8000 such…
A full understanding of glasses requires an accurate atomistic picture of the complex activated processes that constitute the low-temperature dynamics of these materials. To this end, we generate over five thousand activated events in…
We analyze the structure of the energy landscape of a well-relaxed 1000-atom model of amorphous silicon using the activation-relaxation technique (ART nouveau). Generating more than 40,000 events starting from a single minimum, we find that…
We use empirical molecular dynamics technique to study the low-energy vibrations in a large 4096 atom model for pure amorphous silicon and a set of models with voids of different size based on it. Numerical vibrational eigenvalues and…
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 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…
The link between the energy surface of bulk systems and their dynamical properties is generally difficult to establish. Using the activation-relaxation technique (ART nouveau), we follow the change in the barrier distribution of a model of…
A computational approach is presented to obtain energy-minimized structures in glassy materials. This approach, the activation-relaxation technique (ART), achieves its efficiency by focusing on significant changes in the microscopic…
We present here potential dependent mechanical properties of amorphous silicon studied through molecular dynamics (MD) at low temperature. On average, the localization of elementary plastic events and the co-ordination defect-sites appears…
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…
We study the dynamic electrical response of a silicon-molecular monolayer-metal junctions and we observe two contributions in the admittance spectroscopy data. These contributions are related to dipolar relaxation and molecular organization…
We have extended our experimentally constrained molecular relaxation technique (P. Biswas {\it et al}, Phys. Rev. B {\bf 71} 54204 (2005)) to hydrogenated amorphous silicon: a 540-atom model with 7.4 % hydrogen and a 611-atom model with 22…
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…
We have analyzed the atomic rearrangements underlying self-diffusion in amorphous Si during annealing using tight-binding molecular dynamics simulations. Two types of amorphous samples with different structural features were used to analyze…
Structural mechanisms in disordered materials like amorphous semi-conductors and glasses can be explored with the activation-relaxation technique (ART). The application of a sequence of such mechanisms allows for the generation of…
The dynamic slowdown in glass-forming liquids remains a central topic in condensed matter science. Here, we report a theoretical investigation of the microscopic origin of the slowdown in amorphous silica, a prototypical strong glass former…
In this paper we discuss the application of current it ab initio computer simulation techniques to hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H). We begin by discussing thermal fluctuation in the number of coordination defects in the material,…
The dynamics of many atomic systems is controlled by activated events taking place on a time scale which is long compared to that associated with thermal vibrations. This often places problems of interest outside the range of standard…
Tight binding molecular dynamics simulations, with a non orthogonal basis set, are performed to study the fragmentation of carbon fullerenes doped with up to six silicon atoms. Both substitutional and adsorbed cases are considered. The…
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…