When I (JMG) began my Ph.D. studies under the supervision of Archie Howie in 1975, he was still licking his wounds over one of the very few apparently incorrect publications[l] of his career. I am proud that our recent work has shown that, far from being wrong, Archie and Lee Rudee were actually 25 years before their time. It was in the early 1970’s that electron microscopy instrumentation reached the performance level that was adequate to resolve the interplanar spacings in elemental materials, such as the semiconductors silicon and germanium. It immediately became of interest to examine the structure of amorphous silicon and germanium, in the expectation that direct imaging could resolve the old controversy between micro-crystallite and random network structural models. Porai-Koschits was the first to suggest that amorphous materials comprised extremely small crystalline domains (microcrystals), in contrast Zachariasen[2] proposed that a continuous random network was a better description of glassy materials.
Propagating mode-I fracture in amorphous materials using the continuous random network model
