Structural description of iron-silicon amorphous alloys

Typical Fe x Si1-x amorphous alloys have been studied by electron diffraction and resistivity measurements in a wide concentration range (0 ≤ x ≤ 0·75). A description of the short-range order in these systems is proposed in terms of a dense random packing of hard spheres, as in pure amorphous metals, if x ≥ 0·3. In the small iron concentration range (x ≤ 0·2) the structure becomes progressively similar to an amorphous semiconductor, as pictured by a continuous random network model. Iron and silicon atoms appear to be distributed without chemical correlations.