Structural and Electronic Properties of Amorphous Carbon

An amorphous carbon structure is obtained with a computer simulation based on a first-principles molecular-dynamics method, in which the interatomic potential is constructed directly from the electronic ground state, using density-functional techniques. From our results, which agree well with the limited experimental information available, we analyze the short-range order, particularly the fractions of sp^2 and sp^3 sites, together with the electronic properties.