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Updated: Dec 22, 2025

Production of Synthetic Nuclear Melt Glass
Published on: January 4, 2016
On the equivalence of vapor-deposited and melt-quenched glasses
Zhe Wang1, Tao Du1, N M Anoop Krishnan2
1Physics of AmoRphous and Inorganic Solids Laboratory (PARISlab), Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA.
Abstract:
Vapor deposition can yield glasses that are more stable than those obtained by the traditional melt-quenching route. However, it remains unclear whether vapor-deposited glasses are "allowable" or "forbidden," that is, if they are equivalent to glasses formed by cooling extremely slowly a liquid or if they differ in nature from melt-quenched glasses. Here, based on reactive molecular dynamics simulation of silica glasses, we demonstrate that the allowable or forbidden nature of vapor-deposited glasses depends on the temperature of the substrate and, in turn, is found to be encoded in their medium-range order structure.
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