Structural and dynamical heterogeneity in deeply supercooled liquid silicon
Tetsuya Morishita

We report on a first-principles molecular-dynamics study of structural and dynamical heterogeneity in supercooled liquid silicon. We find that highly tetrahedral configurations are intermittently formed and that spatially heterogeneous dynamics is concurrently induced in the deeply supercooled state (1000 K). This heterogeneity is responsible for the anomalous structural relaxation characterized by the stretched-exponential function. The temporal structural fluctuation is found to give rise to the $1/f$ dependence in the corresponding power spectral density. In a moderately supercooled state (1600 K), the structural and dynamical heterogeneity is quite weak, in contrast to the deeply supercooled state. The applicability of the Stillinger-Weber potential to the deeply supercooled state is also discussed.

© 2008 The American Physical Society.