Short, Medium and Long Range Spatial Correlations in Simple Glasses

Abstract

Local stresses and pressures always exist in glasses. In this letter we consider their effects on the structure and structural correlations in simple glasses. We find that extreme values of local pressures are related to well defined local structures. The correlations related to these extreme stresses extend to full system size and decay as a power law with the distance. This result is especially striking, since at large scales, the total density fluctuation exhibits exponentially damped decay similar to the decay in simple liquids. Thus at medium and large distances, the atoms with extreme values of local pressures exhibit higher degree of correlation than the rest of the system. These results were found for glasses with very different short range structure, indicating their general nature.