Roughness and scaling properties of oxide glass surfaces at the nanoscale

TL;DR

This study uses atomistic simulations to analyze the nanoscale roughness of oxide glass surfaces, revealing differences between melt-formed and fracture surfaces and challenging previous assumptions about their fractal nature.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the nanoscale topography of oxide glasses, showing that fracture surfaces are rougher and do not exhibit self-affine fractal behavior at small scales.

Findings

Melt-formed surfaces follow frozen capillary wave theory

Fracture surfaces are significantly rougher than melt-formed surfaces

Fracture surface roughness shows logarithmic dependence, not power-law

Abstract

Using atomistic computer simulations we determine the roughness and topographical features of melt-formed (MS) and fracture surfaces (FS) of oxide glasses. We find that the topography of the MS is described well by the frozen capillary wave theory. The FS are significant rougher than the MS and depend strongly on glass composition. The height-height correlation function for the FS shows an unexpected logarithmic dependence on distance, in contrast to the power-law found in experiments. We thus conclude that on length scales less than 10 nm FS are not self-affine fractals.