A microscopic physical description of the glassy state long has eluded even the top scientists in condensed matter physics because of the complicated noncrystalline nature of glass structure. Currently, many theorists turn to molecular dynamics or other atomistic simulations to determine the structure of various glass compositions. However, although available computing power has increased expon...

Proteins exhibit a variety of dense phases ranging from gels, aggregates, and precipitates to crystalline phases and dense liquids. Although the structure of the crystalline phase is known in atomistic detail, little attention has been paid to noncrystalline protein dense phases, and in many cases the structures of these phases are assumed to be fully amorphous. In this work, we used small-angl...

A molecular-dynamics study of ductile and brittle fracture in model noncrystalline solids Abstract Molecular-dynamics simulations of fracture in model amorphous solids are shown to exhibit brittle or ductile behavior depending on small changes in interatomic potential. Yet, simulations of these two model solids under pure shear reveal no significant difference in their ultimate yield stress. To...

X-ray scattering data at high instrumental resolution are reported for multilamellar vesicles of L alpha phase lipid bilayers of 1,2-dipalmitoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphatidylcholine at 50 degrees C under varying osmotic pressure. The data are fitted to two theories that account for noncrystalline disorder, paracrystalline theory (PT) and modified Caillé theory (MCT). The MCT provides good fits to t...

Diffusion couples combining a hcp Zr90Al10 supersaturated solid solution with a fcc Cu64Ni36 solid solution were annealed at 410 °C for different times. The reaction at the interface was investigated by transmission electron microscopy and energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy. The investigations show the formation of a noncrystalline layer at the interface between the two solid solutions that g...

We report the experiments and procedures to successfully record and reconstruct coherent diffraction patterns at sub-10-nm resolution from noncrystalline samples by using synchrotron x rays with a wavelength of 2 Å. By employing the oversampling phasing method, we studied the quality of image reconstruction of experimental diffraction patterns as a function of the oversampling ratio ~a paramete...

The high levels of soil organic matter (SOM), frequently found in soils with large content of noncrystalline minerals, are traditionally considered the result of strong organo-mineral interactions. Amorphous oxides are likely to provide active sites for SOM sequestration at the colloidal level. Considering that preservation of SOM is favoured by adsorption of humic colloids onto mineral surface...

Highly ordered noncrystalline boron-doped nickel nanotube arrays are rapidly synthesized within 150 s by template-based electroless deposition. The as-prepared nanotubes have tunable magnetic properties and exhibit super efficient catalytic activity (∼70 s) for the reduction of 4-nitrophenol.