Amorphous materials have found application in all manner of consumer products and continue to show promise for next generation technologies. Yet thermal transport in this class of materials remains a point of dispute. We studied the mechanisms of thermal transport in amorphous silicon using molecular dynamics simulation and wavelet transform techniques. Perturbation of a single atom in the equi...

We study the local disorder in the deformation of amorphous materials by decomposing the particle displacements into a continuous, inhomogeneous field and the corresponding fluctuations. We compare these fields to the commonly used affine and non-affine displacements, in an elastically deformed 2D Lennard-Jones glass. The continuous field captures the main features of the non-affine field; howe...

The discovery of improved physical and mechanical properties of amorphous and nanocomposite metallic materials respect to their crystalline counterparts [1], has led to an increasing interest and research activity in the study of these materials during the last two decades. The possibility of tailoring amorphous metallic alloys at cooling rates of 1-100 K/s [2], enables these structurally metas...

For crystalline materials, the microscopic origin of plasticity is well understood in terms of the dynamics of topological defects. For amorphous materials, the underlying structural disorder prevents such a description. Therefore identifying and characterizing the microscopic plastic events in amorphous materials remains an important challenge. We show direct evidence for the coexistence of re...

Recent work shows that nanoparticulate and amorphous molybdenum and tungsten sulfide materials are active catalysts for hydrogen evolution in aqueous solution. These materials hold promise for applications in clean hydrogen production technologies. In this perspective, the syntheses, structures and catalytic activities of nanoparticulate MoS2 and WS2, incomplete cubane-type [Mo3S4] 4+ and amorp...

High-speed melt spinning of a cyclo-olefin polymer (COP) and a copolyamide (CoPA) have been performed. Differential scanning calorimetry curves of the resulting monofilaments show that they remain in an amorphous state even after hot drawing. Wide angle x-ray diffraction patterns of undrawn and drawn COP filaments show that although the material remains in an amorphous state, a degree of orient...

The general and practical inversion of diffraction data-producing a computer model correctly representing the material explored-is an important unsolved problem for disordered materials. Such modeling should proceed by using our full knowledge base, both from experiment and theory. In this paper, we describe a robust method to jointly exploit the power of ab initio atomistic simulation along wi...

Viscoelastic properties of amorphous solids deformed under uniform shear stress were studied using a kind of sandwich method with utilizing a sensitive optical technique. Time-dependent deformation data were analyzed on the basis of a mechanical model of anelasticity plus viscosity. Experiments were performed to determine the temperature dependence of viscosity for several kinds of inorganic gl...

In this Colloquium, I describe some current frontiers in the physics of semiconducting amorphous materials and glasses, including a short, but self-contained discussion of techniques for creating computer models, among them the quench from the melt method, the Activation-Relaxation Technique, the decorate and relax method, and the experimentally constrained molecular relaxation scheme. A repres...

Photonic crystals consist of artificial periodic structures of dielectrics, which have attracted much attention because of their wide range of potential applications in the field of optics. We may also fabricate artificial amorphous or quasicrystalline structures of dielectrics, i.e. photonic amorphous materials or photonic quasicrystals. So far, both theoretical and experimental studies have b...