Pressure amorphization through displacive disorder

Abstract:

After classifying amorphous materials according to their topology, we review a recently proposed theory of pressure amorphization (PA) that arises from some degree of displacive disorder while retaining a crystalline topology. That theory is based on the notion that one or more branches of the phonon spectrum become soft and flat with increasing pressure and is illustrated by a simple model that possesses the range of features displayed by many of the materials which undergo PA with displacive disorder. We report the results of Langevin simulations of the simple model which show how the probability of amorphization increases with the number of unit cells in the system and support our theory. We comment on how to generalize the model for the study of real systems.