Investigation of free volume percolation under the liquid–glass phase transition

Abstract

Mutual arrangement of large volume atomic cells (defined as the Voronoi polyhedra) is investigated in molecular dynamics models of Lennard-Jones liquid, crystal and amorphous solid by the percolation theory methods on the Delaunay network. In addition to ordinary percolation some extended formulations of the percolation problem are realized. All variants of the percolation analysis lead to characteristics of percolating clusters and to the percolation threshold values which do not practically differ for all the three phases. This provides evidence that the phase transition liquid–amorphous solid is not associated with percolation through regions with a large free volume.