| Research Abstract |
This study has been projected to establish the atomic views about the mechanism of structure transition and fluctuation of related physical properties in quartz and its isostructural compounds, by combinatorial application of diffraction and spectroscopic techniques. Although two years were not long enough to perform all the projected subjects, especially spectroscopic experiments, several powerful computer programs were developed to analyze position-time data provided by usual molecular dynamics calculations.
Detailed crystal structure analyzes of AlPO_4 and GaPO_4, both having the quartz type structures, were also completed for single crystal intensity data obtained at different temperatures.
The software package CRYSTAL has five program-units, SDSTR, MDPDF, ORDERP, DTRANS and NOMODE, each executed by teading in data from MD calculations, to calculate scattering intensities (for neutron or X-ray diffraction), dynamical structure factors, atomic probability density functions, atomic mean-square displacements, order parameters and finally normal mode analysis (still under development), respectively. In application of these programs to the MD results for berlinite AlPO_4, an order-disorder type mechanism was found to play important role in the alpha-betastructure transition in this mineral. This result is so important and still preliminary at present, but is not consistent with recent studies such as X-ray results (by the present author), hyper Raman results and hard mode infrared absorption results and so on. The results of the MD calculations must be examined for their reliability, and then some long-term calculations for MD are currently undertaken.
|
