Lithium aluminosilicate glass-ceramics have found widespread commercial success in areas such as consumer products, telescope mirrors, fireplace windows, etc. However, there is still much to learn regarding the fundamental mechanisms of crystallization, especially related to the evolution of viscosity as a function of the crystallization (ceramming) process. In this study, the impact of phase a...

We report large scale simulations of the blue phases of cholesteric liquid crystals. Our results suggest a structure for blue phase III, the blue fog, which has been the subject of a long debate in liquid crystal physics. We propose that blue phase III is an amorphous network of disclination lines, which is thermodynamically and kinetically stabilized over crystalline blue phases at intermediat...

In this study, mechanical activation (balland cryomilling) was successfully applied to obtain coamorphous mixtures of two BCS class II drugs, simvastatin (SVS) and glipizide (GPZ). This pharmacologically relevant combination of two drugs could produce a promising candidate for formulations intended for combination therapy of metabolic disorders. The co-amorphous SVS-GPZ mixtures (molar ratios 2...

Ge2Sb2Te5 and related phase change materials are highly unusual in that they can be readily transformed between amorphous and crystalline states using very fast melt, quench, anneal cycles, although the resulting states are extremely long lived at ambient temperature. These states have remarkably different physical properties including very different optical constants in the visible in strong c...

The characteristics of intrinsic electron and hole trapping in crystalline and amorphous Al2O3 have been studied using density functional theory (DFT). Special attention was paid to enforcing the piece-wise linearity of the total energy with respect to electron number through the use of a range separated, hybrid functional PBE0-TC-LRC (Guidon et al 2009 J. Chem. Theory Comput. 5 3010) in order ...

– Despite the fact that polymer crystallization has been the object of intense research, this process is far from being fully understood. Traditional polymer crystallization studies using X-ray scattering techniques mainly provide information about the ordered regions. To obtain a more complete information about the time evolution of both the crystalline and the amorphous phase during polymer c...

Amorphous and crystalline phases of Ge2Sb2Te5 films are investigated by coherent phonon spectroscopy. By heating amorphous films above specific temperatures, the coherent phonon signatures exhibit pronounced changes due to the crystallization of the amorphous phase into a cubic lattice and the transition from the cubic to a hexagonal crystal structure. The phonon modes observed are identified b...

By means of normal-incidence, high-flux and high-energy X-rays, total scattering data for pair distribution function (PDF) analysis have been obtained from thin films (tf), suitable for local structure analysis. By using amorphous substrates as support for the films, the standard Rapid Acquisition PDF setup can be applied and the scattering signal from the film can be isolated from the total sc...

Lithium aluminosilicate powder precursors of compositions Li2O:Al2O3:SiO2 as 1:1:2; and 1:1:3.11 were synthesized and sintered by the Spark Plasma Sintering technique. The sintering conditions were adjusted to obtain dense ceramic materials in an attempt to avoid the presence of a glassy phase. XRD and SEM images were employed for composition and microstructure characterization. The coefficient...

Ion tracks formed in amorphous Ge by swift heavy-ion irradiation have been identified with experiment and modeling to yield unambiguous evidence of tracks in an amorphous semiconductor. Their underdense core and overdense shell result from quenched-in radially outward material flow. Following a solid-to-liquid phase transformation, the volume contraction necessary to accommodate the high-densit...