Structural study of GeS2 glass: Reverse Monte Carlo modelling for edge-sharing tetrahedral network

The pulsed neutron diffraction and reverse Monte Carlo (RMC) modelling methods were used to investigate the structure of GeS2 glass. The high-resolution real-space neutron data shows that there is a negligible amount of chemical disorder in the structure of GeS2 glass. The RMC modelling was done by fitting to the neutron total structure factor with constraints for the edge- and corner-sharing tetrahedral configurations as well as the nearest neighbour coordination numbers. Two different structure models (two-dimensional layer network and three-dimensional random network) were examined and both the models reproduced the experimental data.