We review recent results on the behaviour of the dielectric function of cylindrical nano-organic materials at very low frequencies in a magnetic field. For cylindrical structures such as carbon nanotubes the polarisability is shown to be a discontinuous function of a longitudinal magnetic field where plateaulike regions are separated by sudden jumps or peaks. A relation is pointed out between e...

High-speed melt spinning of a cyclo-olefin polymer (COP) and a copolyamide (CoPA) have been performed. Differential scanning calorimetry curves of the resulting monofilaments show that they remain in an amorphous state even after hot drawing. Wide angle x-ray diffraction patterns of undrawn and drawn COP filaments show that although the material remains in an amorphous state, a degree of orient...

By definition, solid state is that particular aggregation form of matter characterized by strong interaction forces between constituent particles (atoms, ions, or molecules). As a result, a solid state material has an independent geometric form (in contrast to liquids, which take the form of the container) and an invariant volume (in contrast to gases/vapors) in given temperature and pressure c...

The general and practical inversion of diffraction data-producing a computer model correctly representing the material explored-is an important unsolved problem for disordered materials. Such modeling should proceed by using our full knowledge base, both from experiment and theory. In this paper, we describe a robust method to jointly exploit the power of ab initio atomistic simulation along wi...

Viscoelastic properties of amorphous solids deformed under uniform shear stress were studied using a kind of sandwich method with utilizing a sensitive optical technique. Time-dependent deformation data were analyzed on the basis of a mechanical model of anelasticity plus viscosity. Experiments were performed to determine the temperature dependence of viscosity for several kinds of inorganic gl...

In this Colloquium, I describe some current frontiers in the physics of semiconducting amorphous materials and glasses, including a short, but self-contained discussion of techniques for creating computer models, among them the quench from the melt method, the Activation-Relaxation Technique, the decorate and relax method, and the experimentally constrained molecular relaxation scheme. A repres...

Photonic crystals consist of artificial periodic structures of dielectrics, which have attracted much attention because of their wide range of potential applications in the field of optics. We may also fabricate artificial amorphous or quasicrystalline structures of dielectrics, i.e. photonic amorphous materials or photonic quasicrystals. So far, both theoretical and experimental studies have b...

Using the Monte Carlo method in the frame of the Heisenberg model we performed simulation of magnetic properties of Re100-xTbx (x=5–91 at. %) amorphous alloys and of pure amorphous Tb. Exchange interaction between the nearest neighbours and random uniaxial anisotropy were taken into account in the Hamiltonian. We calculated temperature dependence of magnetization, Edwards–Anderson order paramet...

It is argued that the topological disorder in a small region of an amorphous solid can be described by the local strain field related to the local reference crystal. A localized state spread only in one distorted region can be viewed as the consequence of superposition among some Bloch waves and its scattering waves caused by the disorder. A semiclassical approximation is used to calculate the ...