Structural investigations of amorphous transition element films

Abstract

A randomly connected array of slightly irregular tetrahedra is shown to be highly successful in representing the structure of amorphous thin films of the transition metals. A notable feature of the present model is that it can also be used to represent the liquid state. The latter result is achieved without any modification of the actual model building technique, and requires only an intro- duction of simple thermal fluctuations and a reduction in regularity of the tetrahedra composing the model. Representation of the amorphous solid structure by a totally random or microcrystalline model is also considered, the latter being unsuccessful even when interfacial effects were taken into account.