Strings and interstitials in liquids, glasses and crystals

¹ Accelerator Laboratory, University of Helsinki - P.O. Box 43, FIN-00014, Finland
² Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801, USA
³ Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Jerusalem 91904, Israel
⁴ Department of Physics, University of Illinois - Urbana, IL 61801, USA

Corresponding author: kai.nordlund@helsinki.fi

Received: 23 February 2005
Accepted: 22 June 2005

Abstract

Recent work has shown that atom motion in liquids is not completely homogeneous, but that stringlike cooperative motion can be used to explain several properties of liquids. We now show that with increasing concentration the properties of interstitial atoms in crystalline materials smoothly approach and eventually completely match the properties of the string atoms in liquids. In terms of the interstitialcy theory of liquids and solids, the strings are direct manifestations of interstitials.