Pressure-induced amorphization, crystal-crystal transformations and the memory glass effect in interacting particles in two dimensions

We study a model of interacting particles in two dimensions to address the relation between crystal-crystal transformations and pressure-induced amorphization. On increasing pressure at very low temperature, our model undergoes a martensitic crystal-crystal transformation. The characteristics of the resulting polycrystalline structure depend on defect density, compression rate, and nucleation and growth barriers. We find two different limiting cases. In one of them the martensite crystals, once nucleated, grow easily perpendicularly to the invariant interface, and the final structure contains large crystals of the different martensite variants. Upon decompression almost every atom returns to its original position, and the original crystal is fully recovered. In the second limiting case, after nucleation the growth of martensite crystals is inhibited by energetic barriers. The final morphology in this case is that of a polycrystal with a very small crystal size. This may be taken to be amorphous if we have only access (as experimentally may be the case) to the angularly averaged structure factor. However, this `X-ray amorphous' material is anisotropic, and this shows up upon decompression, when it recovers the original crystalline structure with an orientation correlated with the one it had prior to compression. The memory effect of this X-ray amorphous material is a natural consequence of the memory effect associated to the underlying martensitic transformation. We suggest that this kind of mechanism is present in many of the experimental observations of the memory glass effect, in which a crystal with the original orientation is recovered from an apparently amorphous sample when pressure is released.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Temperature Evolution of Sodium Nitrite Structure in a Restricted Geometry

The NaNO$_{2}$ nanocomposite ferroelectric material in porous glass was studied by neutron diffraction. For the first time the details of the crystal structure including positions and anisotropic thermal parameters were determined for the solid material, embedded in a porous matrix, in ferro- and paraelectric phases. It is demonstrated that in the ferroelectric phase the structure is consistent with bulk data but above transition temperature the giant growth of amplitudes of thermal vibrations is observed, resulting in the formation of a "premelted state". Such a conclusion is in a good agreement with the results of dielectric measurements published earlier.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure