Nonequilibrium origin of native ring anisotropy in amorphous systems

ZH Wang and D Bouwmeester, PHYSICAL REVIEW B, 111, 224205 (2025).

DOI: 10.1103/fl5h-11st

Native ring structures within amorphous networks play a critical role in determining structural and optical properties, in part due to their ability to host dopants such as rare-earth ions in silicate systems. In this work, we demonstrate that the universal features of structural anisotropy in amorphous networks can be efficiently simulated using a model based on stochastically deformed, edge-sharing N-member native ring structures. This model isolates and characterizes the structural anisotropy generated during the annealing-quenching process that is independent of any constituent-specific interactions. We refer to this computational framework as indistinguishable simulated folding (ISF), a stochastic process that mimics a simulated annealing-quenching procedure. Formulated as a Markov process, ISF is governed by two physically meaningful parameters: the number of Markov steps, representing the mean duration of each ring-folding event, and the stochastic deformation magnitude, which quantifies thermally induced structural changes per event. Furthermore, we show that the logarithm of any positive-valued anisotropy measure generated by ISF is a skewed random variable, reflecting the growing entropy production rate during the Markov evolution. ISF provides both a conceptual framework for understanding the universal stochastic origin of structural anisotropy in amorphous networks and a practical tool for simulating constituent- independent features, without requiring full-scale molecular dynamics simulations.

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