Energy landscape of relaxed amorphous silicon

Abstract

We analyze the structure of the energy landscape of a well-relaxed 1000-atom model of amorphous silicon using the activation-relaxation technique (ART nouveau). Generating more than 40,000 events starting from a single minimum, we find that activated mechanisms are local in nature, that they are distributed uniformly throughout the model and that the activation energy is limited by the cost of breaking one bond, independently of the complexity of the mechanism. The overall shape of the activation-energy-barrier distribution is also insensitive to the exact details of the configuration, indicating that well-relaxed configurations see essentially the same environment. These results underscore the localized nature of relaxation in this material.

8 pages, 12 figures

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• Replenish and relax: explaining logarithmic annealing in disordered materials
• A microscopic description of light induced defects in amorphous silicon solar cells
• Enlightening the atomistic mechanisms driving self-diffusion of amorphous Si during annealing
• Charge-dependent migration pathways for the Ga vacancy in GaAs
• Amorphous silicon under mechanical shear deformations: shear velocity and temperature effects
• Connected Network Model for the Mechanical Loss of Amorphous Materials