The Nanostructures of Amorphous Silicas

Topologically modeled amorphized silica structures have been refined using a molecular dynamics simulation technique. Several metastable structures with substantially different medium-range connectivities, as characterized by primitive ring statistics, were obtained. Whereas the total correlation function is insensitive to these differences, the first sharp diffraction peak derived from energy-filtered electron diffraction shows a promising correlation to medium-range structure.