用四点关联函数揭示液体的三维结构
Revealing the three-dimensional structure of liquids using four-point correlation functions
摘要：
无序系统如液体、凝胶、玻璃或颗粒材料不仅在日常生活和工业应用中普遍存在，而且它们对于细胞的机械稳定性或生物体内化学和生物制剂的运输也至关重要。尽管这些系统的重要性，它们的微观结构仅在初步水平上被理解，因此与气体和晶体的情况形成鲜明对比。由于散射实验和分析计算通常只给出球平均的结构信息，因此无序系统的三维（3D）结构基本上是未知的。在这里，我们介绍一个简单的方法，允许探测这种系统的三维结构。使用计算机模拟，我们发现，硬球状液体在中等和大尺度上具有复杂的结构顺序，由交替层与二十面体和十二面体对称性，而开放的网络液体，如二氧化硅具有四面体对称性的结构顺序。这些结果表明，液体具有高度非平凡的3D结构，这种结构信息被编码在非标准的关联函数。
英文摘要：
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and biological agents in living organisms. Despite the importance of these systems, their microscopic structure is understood only on a rudimentary level, thus in stark contrast to the case of gases and crystals. Since scattering experiments and analytical calculations usually give only structural information that is spherically averaged, the three dimensional (3D) structure of disordered systems is basically unknown. Here we introduce a simple method that allows to probe the 3D structure of such systems. Using computer simulations we find that hard-sphere-like liquids have on intermediate and large scales an intricate structural order given by alternating layers with icosahedral and dodecahedral symmetries, while open network liquids like silica have a structural order with tetrahedral symmetry. These results show that liquids have a highly non-trivial 3D structure and that this structural information is encoded in non-standard correlation functions.
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