Ring statistics of silica bilayers

TL;DR

This paper compares experimental and simulated silica bilayer ring statistics, analyzing size distributions, correlations, and introducing a new law for ring areas to better understand their structural properties.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of experimental and simulated silica bilayer ring statistics and introduces a new law for ring areas.

Findings

Experimental and simulated samples show similar ring size distributions.

Small rings tend to be adjacent to larger rings, following the Aboav-Weaire law.

A new law for the areas of rings of various sizes is proposed.

Abstract

The recent synthesis and characterization of bilayers of vitreous silica has produced valuable new information on ring sizes and distributions. In this paper, we compare the ring statistics of experimental samples with computer generated samples. The average ring size is fixed at six by topology, but the width, skewness and other moments of the distribution of ring edges are characteristics of particular samples. We examine the Aboav-Weaire law that quantifies the propensity of smaller rings to be adjacent to larger rings, and find similar results for available experimental samples which however differ somewhat from computer-generated bilayers currently. We introduce a new law for the areas of rings of various sizes.