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What is the structure of a liquid?

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Conclusion

The consolidation of studies of the structure of liquids and amorphous solids, which is taking place at present and is being accompanied by the formation of a new science studying the regular features of the spatial distribution of disordered systems (“amorphography”?), requires a clear definition of the fundamental concept of structure. Here we have tried to justify the concept of the structure of a substance as a list of the coordinates of its component particles and the laws directing by means of any such list. This concept differs significantly from the idea of the structure of a liquid as short-range order and also from the statistical description. The idea developed here, of the structure of a liquid (which approaches to the maximum extent the concept of structure in crystallography) gives a very narrow task of structural description, by defining it exclusively as the static geometric aspect of the study of systems of particles. There is the refore nothing strange or unnatural in the fact that it stands outside the limits of statistical physics, which sets itself the much wider aim of describing all the macroscopic properties of a substance. The problems of the statistical and structural descriptions to a considerable extent do not overlap.

In everyday practice, there is an undoubted tendency to use the term structure of a substance to describe that concrete aspect of a study with which the author is concerned (in fact, what is being talked about here is not “structure” but “structure in the wider aspect”). It is natural that from this broad position, the extremely narrow definition of the problems of the structural description will hardly meet approval. However, a clearer understanding of the concept of “structure” and systematic work on the creation of a new branch of scientific knowledge, concerned with the laws of irregular packing, will undoubtedly lead to a decrease in the number of concepts and terms being used intuitively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Chemical Kinetics and Combustion, Siberian Branch, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, USSR

    Yu. I. Naberukhin

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Paper dedicated to the ninetieth birthday of N. V. Belov.

Translated from Zhurnal Strukturnoi Khimii, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 62–80, November–December, 1981.

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Naberukhin, Y.I. What is the structure of a liquid?. J Struct Chem 22, 850–864 (1981). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00746594

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