Six years passed by since the NATO ASI on "Liquid and Amorphous Metals" was held in Zwiesel, Germany, in September 1979. The present one is the second NATO School devoted to research on disordered condensed matter, mainly liquid and amorphous metals. This time the title contains the word "materials" to explicitely include those aspects of the glassy state of insulators either shared with metallic glasses - e.g. the glass tran­ sition - or on the border line with metallic systems - e.g. the metal­ non-metal transition. The long period which purposely elapsed between the two Institutes indi­ cates the intention not to have "just another conference", but to review the state of affairs in the field with a somewhat more durable scope. This is especially important to help basic research to bridge towards applica­ tions and to introduce young researchers in this field. In fact, while the understanding of these materials and their properties is a tremendous challenge for experimental and theoretical physicists, glassy substances offer an enormous potential in-the development of new materials for tech­ nical applications. To this end, the Institute has brought together insiders and peers from allover the world to discuss basic principles and latest results and to help correlate future research effort. Another important aim was to intro­ duce newcomers to the field.

Inhalt

1. General Topics.- Proteins and Glasses.- Fractals and Localization.- Relation between Microstructure, Transport and Optical Properties in Composite Materials.- Comments on the Mode Coupling Theory of the Liquid Glass transition.- Computer Simulation Studies of Atomic Structure and Dynamics Relevant to Liquid and Amorphous Alloys.- On Surface Properties of the Classical One-Component Plasma.- 2. Structure of Liquids.- Relations between Atomic Arrangement and Electronic Structure in Liquid Metals and Alloys.- Liquid Structure and Freezing of Metals and Molten Salts.- The Structure of Liquid Binary Alloys.- Glass Transition in Simple Molten Salts.- Local Order at the Manganese Sites in Ionic Solutions by XANES.- "Bond"-Orientational Short Range Order in Liquid Aluminium.- 3. Structure of Amorphous Materials.- Atomic Short Range Order in Amorphous Materials.- Electronically Driven Structural Effects in Liquid and Amorphous Metals and Alloys.- The Origin of Microstructures of Rapidly Solidified Alloys.- Disorder in Metals - Selected Problems.- Defects in Amorphous Alloys.- Superconducting and Structural Properties of Amorphous Zr (Ni,Mo,W)-Alloys.- 4. Dynamics of Liquids and Amorphous Materials.- Atomic Motions in Liquids.- Experimental Studies of Atomic Motions in Liquid Metals.- Atomic Dynamics in Binary Liquids with Attractive A-B Interaction.- Transition from Gaußian to Dispersive Atomic Transport in Amorphous Materials.- Interaction Effects in Liquids with Low Electron Densities.- Nuclear iQuadrupolar Relaxation and Thermodynamics in Liquid Ternary Alloys.- Single Particle Motion in Liquid Sodium.- 5. Electronic Properties of Liquid and Amorphous Materials.- Electronic Structure and Transport in Amorphous and Liquid Metals.- Electronic Structure of Metallic Glasses - Bulk and Surface Properties.- Fluid Metals at High Temperatures.- Low Temperature Transport Properties: The Electrical Resistivity of some Amorphous Alloys.- Amorphous Metals at High Pressure.- Electron Localization in the Liquid Tl-Te-System as seen by Bi-Impurity.- Temperature Dependence of the Hall-Effect in some Amorphous Transition Metal Alloys.- Magnetoresistance Studies of Amorphous FeZr Alloys.- Magnetoconductivity of MgZn Metallic Glasses at Low Temperatures.- Optical Properties of Pt-Si Glasses.- Electrical Resistivity of Liquid Rare Earth-Transition Alloys of Nickel with Lanthanum and Cerium.- 6. Production of Amorphous Materials.- Formation of Non-Crystalline Metallic Alloys with and without Rapid Quenching.- Materials Amorphized by Laser Irradiation.- How to Produce Well-Defined Amorphous Alloys.- Ion Implantation and Amorphisation in Metallic Systems.- Surface Amorphous Alloys Obtained by Ion-Mixing.- Organometallic Glass-Forming Materials and their Structure.- Bulk Amorphous Metals by Solid State Reaction.