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.