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Understanding structure of non-crystalline materials is still challenging topic in physics due to the inherent nature of disorder in non-crystalline materials. Diffraction is a powerful measure to reveal atomic structure of crystalline materials because of well-defined theory of crystallography developed on the basis of the understanding of Bragg peaks observed in diffraction data. However, diffraction patterns of non-crystalline materials exhibit so called halo pattern owing to inherent disorder in atomic arrangement. The use of pair distribution function obtained from a Fourier transform of normalized diffraction data provides short-range structure in terms of atomic distance and coordination number. The atomic structure beyond the short-range structure, so called intermediate (medium)-range order has been widely studied by X-ray and neutron diffraction measurements from the late 1980s. In particular, the advent of advanced quantum beam facilities in the late last century provides high-flux synchrotron X-rays and neutrons to reveal the intermediate-range structure of non-crystalline materials by understanding of diffraction peaks aided by the advanced computer simulation techniques. In this article, we review recent advances in our studies [8–10] and address a future direction to understand the atomic structure of non-crystalline materials beyond the intermediate-range order.

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• Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 International
  

Keyword: glass, structure, diffraction, intermediate-range order

Date published: 2026-12-31

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Journal:

• Advances in Physics: X (ISSN: 23746149) vol. 11 issue. 1 2689901

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Manuscript type: Publisher's version (Version of record)

MDR DOI:

First published URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/23746149.2026.2689901

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Updated at: 2026-07-16 09:04:58 +0900

Published on MDR: 2026-07-16 10:37:17 +0900