Recent advances in identifying the structure of liquid and glassy oxide and chalcogenide materials under extreme conditions: a joint approach using diffraction and atomistic simulation

The advent of advanced instrumentation and measurement
protocols makes it increasingly feasible to use X-ray and
neutron diffraction methods to investigate the structure
of liquid and glassy materials under extreme conditions of
high-temperatures and/or high-pressures. In particular, a
combination of diffraction and modern simulation techniques
is allowing for an understanding of the structure of these
disordered materials at both the atomistic and electronic levels.
In this article, we highlight some of the recent work in solving
the structure of liquid and glassy oxide and chalcogenide
materials under extreme conditions. We consider, in turn, the
use of aerodynamic levitation with laser heating to investigate
the structure of high-temperature oxide melts and to
fabricate novel glassy materials by container-less processing;
the use of high-pressure methods in the gigapascal regime
to investigate the mechanisms of network collapse for glassy
network structures; and the simultaneous application of high pressures
and high-temperatures to explore the structure of
disordered materials. Finally, we consider the use of other
quantum-beam diffraction-based techniques for probing the
order hidden in the correlation functions that describe the
structure of disordered matter.