Irradiation- vs. vitrification-induced disordering: The case of𝜶-quartz and glassy silica

Evidence of a two-dimensional glass transition in graphene: Insights from molecular simulations

Liquids exhibit a sudden increase in viscosity when cooled fast enough, avoiding thermodynamically predicted route of crystallization. This phenomenon, known as glass transition, leads to the formation of non-periodic structures known as glasses. Extensive studies have been conducted on model materials to understand glass transition in two dimensions. However, despite the synthesis of disordered/amorphous single-atom thick structures of carbon, little attention has been given to glass transition in realistic two-dimensional materials such as graphene. Herein, using molecular dynamics simulation, we demonstrate the existence of glass transition in graphene leading to a realistic two-dimensional glassy structure, namely glassy graphene. We show that the resulting glassy structure exhibits excellent agreement with experimentally realized disordered graphene. Interestingly, this glassy graphene exhibits a wrinkled but stable structure, with reduced thermal vibration in comparison to its crystalline counterpart. We suggest that the topological disorder induced by glass transition governs the unique properties of this structure.

Relaxation study of pre-densified silica glasses under 2.5 MeV electron irradiation

We examined the “relaxation properties” of pre-densified synthetic fused silica glass under 2.5 MeV electron irradiation. The densification of the glass was either obtained by hot compression (5 GPa-350 °C and 5 GPa-1000 °C) or via a thermal treatment increasing its fictive temperature (T_f = 1050, 1250 and 1400 °C). Under irradiation, the pre-densified silica glasses exhibit a relaxation of their macroscopic density with increasing integrated dose. Density was reduced for hot compressed silica and increased for T_f samples with different relaxation rates but it is remarkable that all sample densities follow a trend towards the same equilibrium value around 2.26 for a dose larger than 10 GGy despite a different final topology. After irradiation of hot compressed silica, the Raman spectra display a significant increment of 4 and almost 3-membered rings whereas they exhibit a glass density reduction; demonstrating that a D₂ band increase cannot be considered as an absolute marker of the glass compaction. The correlation between density and D₂ intensity remains valid until silica density remains lower than 2.26. In contrast, the FWHM of the main band peaking at 440 cm⁻¹ appears to remain correlated to the silica glass density for all investigated samples.

Absence of single critical dose for the amorphization of quartz under ion irradiation

In this work, we first simulated the amorphization of crystalline quartz under 50 keV [Formula: see text]Na ion irradiation with classical molecular dynamics (MD). We then used binary collision approximation algorithms to simulate the Rutherford backscattering spectrometry in channeling conditions (RBS-C) from these irradiated MD cells, and compared the RBS-C spectra with experiments. The simulated RBS-C results show an agreement with experiments in the evolution of amorphization as a function of dose, showing what appears to be (by this measure) full amorphization at about 2.2 eV⋅[Formula: see text]. We also applied other analysis methods, such as angular structure factor, Wigner-Seitz, coordination analysis and topological analysis, to analyze the structural evolution of the irradiated MD cells. The results show that the atomic-level structure of the sample keeps evolving after the RBS signal has saturated, until the dose of about 5 eV⋅[Formula: see text]. The continued evolution of the [Formula: see text] structure makes the definition of what is, on the atomic level, an amorphized quartz ambiguous.

New Order-Parameter-Based Method for Characterizing Radiation Damage in Amorphous Materials

We present a new method of characterizing damage arising from α-recoil cascades in amorphous materials including glasses. The approach taken is topological, yielding information on atom connectivity and utilizing complete sets of orthogonal functions (spherical harmonics and Hermite functions) to compute order parameters. The utility of our new approach is demonstrated by first applying it to models of radiation-damaged crystalline zircon, enabling validation against the standard defect counting method (Wigner-Seitz). We then apply it to a simple model of a glass, obtained by supercooling a Lennard-Jones liquid, for which defect counting methods are inapplicable. The method shows great promise for use in characterizing damage in more complicated glasses, particularly those of interest in the immobilization of nuclear waste, and when used in conjunction with nonequilibrium computer simulation could be a powerful tool to elucidate experimental data on the radiation tolerance of such wasteforms.