From quasicrystals to icosahedral glass.

Abstract

In the present work, a model of glass is constructed by relating the order in metallic glasses to that of an ideal structure, the icosahedral quasicrystal. The Landau theory of this model leads to a ground state which is an ordered array of solitons. There are many stationary states corresponding to different soliton networks. It is argued that topological constraints lead to finite barriers separating these states. The system can therefore be effectively frozen into one of these metastable states. It is suggested that the excitations in one of these metastable states are related to the orientational degree of freedom of the order parameter. The model provides an attractive framework for understanding the physics of metallic glasses.