Glasses And Amorphous Materials

Advances in the Chemistry and Physics of Materials is a compilation of topics on the recent developments in the areas of Materials Science.Materials Science has been a subject of major interest which has garnered significant attention over the years. Chemists and physicists have contributed extensively to this frontier research area and their synergistic efforts have led to the discovery of many new, exciting materials involving novel functions. In the light of the growing importance of the field of Materials Science, and owing to the fact that it is a subject that holds a lot of promise, internationally renowned Materials Chemist Prof. C.N.R Rao along with his colleagues at the School of Advanced Materials, at JNCASR, have compiled the contents of this book to highlight and showcase the emerging trends in materials science.It touches upon topics spanning over nanomaterials and various other classes of energy materials for harvesting, storage and conversion. The relatively new and exciting range of materials such as supramolecular, soft and biomaterials have been introduced and elucidated, in the book. Special emphasis has been laid on the synthesis, phenomena and characterization of these kinds of materials. Theoretical and Computational Chemistry has played an important role in the growth of Materials Science as a discipline, and the book covers a special topical session on the theoretical efforts in materials research.The book, packed with theory and practical aspects in a crisp and concise manner, aims to take the reader on an intense scientific expedition. The compilation provides an insight into the chemistry and physics of materials and presents up-to-date status reports which would, undoubtedly, be useful to practitioners, teachers and students.

Metallic glasses and amorphous materials have attracted much more attention in the last two decades. A noncrystalline solid produced by continuous cooling from the liquid state is known as a glass. From the other point of view, a noncrystalline material, obtained by any other process, for example, vapor deposition or solid-state processing methods such as mechanical alloying, but not directly from the liquid state, is referred to as an amorphous material. At this moment, bulk metallic glasses (BMG) are appearing as a new class of metallic materials with unique physical and mechanical properties for structural and functional usage. Extreme values of strength, fracture toughness, magnetic properties, corrosion resistance, and other properties have been registered in BMG materials.

Bulk metallic glasses are a new emerging field of materials with many desirable and unique properties. These amorphous materials have many diverse applications from structural applications to biomedical implants. This book provides a complete overview of bulk metallic glasses. It covers the principles of alloy design, glass formation, processing, atomistic modeling, computer simulations, mechanical properties and microstructures.

Long awaited, this textbook fills the gap for convincing concepts to describe amorphous solids. Adopting a unique approach, the author develops a framework that lays the foundations for a theory of amorphousness. He unravels the scientific mysteries surrounding the topic, replacing rather vague notions of amorphous materials as disordered crystalline solids with the well-founded concept of ideal amorphous solids. A classification of amorphous materials into inorganic glasses, organic glasses, glassy metallic alloys, and thin films sets the scene for the development of the model of ideal amorphous solids, based on topology- and statistics-governed rules of three-dimensional sphere packing, which leads to structures with no short, mid or long-range order. This general model is then concretized to the description of specific compounds in the four fundamental classes of amorphous solids, as well as amorphous polyethylene and poly(methyl)methacrylate, emphasizing its versatility and descriptive power. Finally, he includes example applications to indicate the abundance of amorphous materials in modern-day technology, thus illustrating the importance of a better understanding of their structure and properties. Equally ideal as supplementary reading in courses on crystallography, mineralogy, solid state physics, and materials science where amorphous materials have played only a minor role until now.

This book reviews principal topical issues on the basic science of glasses and amorphous thin-films. It also includes select applications of these materials in current and evolving technologies, including optical recording, imaging, solar cells, battery technology and field-emission displays. The glass systems of interest include oxides, chalcogenides and chalcohalides of the group III, IV and V elements, as well as amorphous thin-films of the group IV elements. Glass formation in covalent melts can be understood in terms of new ideas based on constraint counting algorithms which have led to the fragile-strong classification and to the concept of rigidity transition. Vibrational excitations and characterization of the atomic scale structure at various length scales are addressed by an array of experimental probes, including X-ray and neutron scattering, Brillouin scattering, Raman scattering and infrared reflectance, solid state nuclear magnetic resonance, nuclear quadrupole resonance and Mössbauer spectroscopy. Chapters are also devoted to the physics of electronic transport in amorphous materials, to the physics of tunneling states in crystalline and amorphous solids, and the physics of light-induced effects in glasses. In addition, a chapter is devoted to the rapidly evolving field of numerical simulations of disordered systems by computer modeling. Each of these topics is discussed by experts who have made significant contributions to the field. The book can serve as a text for a graduate course in glass science. For an established researcher, it provides, in a concise form, a large body of experimental data on the basic materials research aspect of these fascinating materials. Contents:Glass Formation and the Nature of the Glass Transition (C A Angell)Dual Nature of Molecular Glass Transitions (J C Phillips)The Generic Phenomenology of Glass Formation (I Gutzow)The Structure and Rigidity of Network Glasses (M F Thorpe et al.)Glass Structure by Scattering Methods and Spectroscopy:X-Ray and Neutron Diffraction (A C Wright)Mössbauer Spectroscopy (P Boolchand)Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance (NQR) Studies of Glass Structure (P J Bray)Solid State NMR as a Structural Tool in Glass Science (H Eckert)Vibrational Excitations in Glasses:Inelastic Neutron Scattering (R L Cappelletti)Rigidity Transition and Lamb-Mössbauer Factors (P Boolchand)Raman Scattering (K Murase)Low Frequency Vibrational Excitations in Glasses by Brillouin and Raman Scattering (C Levelut)Tunneling Systems in Crystalline and Amorphous Solids (S Hunklinger & C Enss)Electronic Transport in Disordered Semiconductors (H Overhoff & P Thomas)Molecular Dynamic Simulations of Network Glasses (D A Drabold)Light-Induced Structural Changes in Glasses (H Fritzsche)Chalcohalide Glasses (J Lucas)Applications of Non-Crystalline Materials:Applications of Glasses, Amorphous and Disordered Materials (S Ovshinsky)Amorphous Chalcogenide Photoconductors in Imaging Technologies (S O Kasap & J A Rowlands)Real Time Optical Recording on Thin Films of Amorphous Semiconductors (M Mitkova) Diamond Based Field Emission Displays (J E Jaskie) Readership: Physicists, materials scientists, ceramists, chemists, electrical engineers, and mathematicians working with numerical and computational methods who have an interest in glass science. Keywords:Glass Transition;Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy;Raman Scattering;Mossbauer Spectroscopy;Molecular Dynamic Simulations;Optical Recording;Brillouin Scattering;Intermediate Phases;Modulated Differential Scanning Calorimetry;Neutron Scattering

The physics of glassy materials and disordered solids presents students with an area of study much more challenging than the physics of crystalline solids. Written by two recognized experts in the field, this highly readable book tackles the subject with the student firmly in mind, beginning with a pedagogical introduction to important concepts such as percolation, fractals, spin glasses, and glasses. Making use of these concepts, the authors show that such systems share many common aspects that can be described within the framework of statistical mechanics. The book is also an essential standard text for researchers on amorphous materials, equally accessible for theorists and experimentalists.