Amorphous Solids and Icosahedral Phases

The amorphous state is a nonequilibrium structure in a thermodynamic sense a crystalline arrangement has a lower energy than a glassy state. If the crystalline lattice has point defects, there is some favorable entropy contribution to the stability. 

When crystalline solids are prepared in an amorphous form they acquire other properties. Glasses are much easier to shape than crystalline inorganic materials such as ceramics. The amorphous modification can be made from the crystalline parent solid by intense, repeated deformations (e.g., in a ball mill), by means of an ion bombardment, by mechanical shock, or by low-temperature vapor deposition. Such 

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