Structure Of Non-Crystaline Inorganic Solids

Structure determinations of amorphous materials have steadily progressed since the first application of diffraction methods to the study of liquids and glasses. Successive improvements in experimental methods and increasingly refined models have widened our knowledge of the short-range order and phase separation phenomena in amorphous materials. However, in spite of evidence given by transmission electron microscopy of the existence of a "texture" in some one-phase glasses, the choice between "continuous network," "crystallite" or "para crystalline" phyotheses could not be made on the basis of averaged correlation curves obtained from diffraction data.