Structural analysis of metallic glasses with computational homology (Q267853)

This book presents a combination of physical and mathematical chapters aimed to provide an introduction to the methods. It gives an analysis and classification of disordered media represented, as an example, by metallic glasses. Namely, this alternation of styles makes the text useful for a wide auditory: the physical chapters give a clear introduction into the underlying structures and the motivation of the approach, while the mathematical chapters provide a formal description of mathematical methods, which are proposed to resolve the stated questions. The first and second chapters give a compressed but very clear statement of the principal differences between ordered (crystal) and disordered (amorphous) substances, the tools for their structural analysis and possible benefits of the topological consideration. It is argued and illustrated that the count of connected components and holes, i.e., Betti numbers, has important advantages: it allows neglecting by differences between particular realizations of non-uniformities taking only the global principal characteristics into account. The second chapter concretizes these topics for metallic glasses and particular experimental methods (e.g., Angström-beam electron diffraction) revealing data for analysis. The third chapter is written much more mathematically. It delivers to the reader a sequential introduction into cubical homology. The authors start from well-illustrated basic ideas, then introduce corresponding mathematical notations, and, finally, formally formulate all definitions and properties required for the stated goal of applications. Note also that some more formal and advanced questions are placed in appendices. The fourth chapter couples these lines of reasoning into the practical example of applications of homological methods to the study of metallic glasses and their difference from crystals. The authors formulate the method for the preparation of cubucal datasets (represented by sets of spheres) from atomic configurations, the blow-up of these spheres, which results in the plots of the 0-th Betti number as a function of the normalized atom radii, and the interpretation of obtained curves with respect to underlying glass/crystal structures. Finally, it should be noted that this book not only reviews the obtained results but also shortly formulates open problems and emerging topics in the field of more accurate homological analysis of disordered media.