Amorphous solids
In condensed matter physics and materials science, an amorphous (from the Greek a, without, morphé, shape, form) or non-crystalline solid is a solid that lacks the long-range order that is characteristic of a crystal. In some older books, the term has been used synonymously with glass. Nowadays, "glassy solid" or "amorphous solid" is considered to be the overarching concept, and glass the more special case: A glass is an amorphous solid that exhibits a glass transition. Polymers are often amorphous. Other types of amorphous solids include gels, thin films, and nanostructured materials such as glass.
Amorphous materials have an internal structure made of interconnected structural blocks. Whether a material is liquid or solid depends primarily on the connectivity between its elementary building blocks so that solids are characterized by a high degree of connectivity whereas structural blocks in fluids have lower connectivity (see figure on amorphous material states).
Even amorphous materials have some shortrange order at the atomic length scale due to the nature of chemical bonding (see structure of liquids and glasses for more information on non-crystalline material structure). Furthermore, in very small crystals a large fraction of the atoms are the crystal; relaxation of the surface and interfacial effects distort the atomic positions, decreasing the structural order. Even the most advanced structural characterization techniques, such as x-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy, have difficulty in distinguishing between amorphous and crystalline structures on these length scales.
Amorphous phases are important constituents of thin films, which are solid layers of a few nanometres to some tens of micrometres thickness deposited upon a substrate. So-called structure zone models were developed to describe the micro structure and ceramics of thin films as a function of the homologous temperature Th that is the ratio of deposition temperature over melting temperature. According to these models, a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the occurrence of amorphous phases is that Th has to be smaller than 0.3, that is the deposition temperature must be below 30% of the melting temperature. For higher values, the surface diffusion of deposited atomic species would allow for the formation of crystallites with long range atomic order.
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