Disordered Materials : An Introduction Book

1	Solids: Geometrical and Symmetrical Properties	1
1.1	The Platonic Solids and Their Duals	1
1.2	Elements of Symmetry in Space	9
1.3	Polytopes in the Four Dimensional Space and Their Projections onto the Physical Space	13
1.4	Elements of Crystallography	17
1.5	The Reciprocal Lattice	27
2	Structural Order	31
2.1	Order and Disorder	31
2.2	Rules of Order	33
2.3	Order Parameters	35
2.4	Cellular Disorder and Topological Disorder	40
2.5	Structurally Disordered Materials	42
2.6	Description of Disorder Through Entropy	47
3	The Glass Transition	53
3.1	The Phenomenology of Glass Transition	53
3.2	Theories of the Glass Transition	65
3.3	Ease of Glass Formation	76
4	The Structure of Disordered Systems	87
4.1	Why We Study the Structure of Amorphous Systems	87
4.2	The Distribution Functions	89
4.3	Experimental Techniques: Diffraction	98
4.4	Experimental Techniques: EXAFS	115
4.5	Experimental Techniques: Mossbauer Spectroscopy	124
4.6	Experimental Techniques: Vibrational Spectroscopies	128
4.7	Short Range Order	143
4.8	Medium Range Order	157
4.9	Structural Models	169
5	Clusters	179
5.1	Definition of an Atomic Cluster	179
5.2	Synthesis and Detection of Atomic Clusters	185
5.3	Structure of van der Waals Clusters	187
5.4	Structure of Alkali-Metal Clusters	201
5.5	The Fullerene C[subscript 60]	216
5.6	Cluster-Assembled, Nanostructured Materials	225
6	Quasicrystals	231
6.1	Periodic and Aperiodic Crystals	231
6.2	The Enlarged Notion of Crystal	238
6.3	Quasicrystals and Tilings	243
6.4	Model Structures and Crystalline Approximants	249
6.5	Structural Properties and Stability of Real Quasicrystals	261
A	Appendix	275
	References	279
	Index	285