Intermediate-range order in glasses and liquids

Abstract

Many glasses and liquids exhibit a first sharp diffraction peak that is evidence for intermediate-range order caused by regularities in the packing of structural units. These tend to cluster around particular values of the wavevector when scaled by the nearest-neighbour distance or the mean inter-atomic spacing. The first sharp diffraction peak is distinguished from the pre-peak in binary metallic glasses, which occurs at higher wavevectors when scaled in this way.