CRYSTALLIZATION IN A MODEL GLASS - INFLUENCE OF THE BOUNDARY-CONDITIONS

Using molecular dynamics calculations and the Voronoi tessellation, we study the evolution of the local structure of a soft-sphere glass vs, temperature starting from the liquid phase at different quenching rat es. This study is done for different sizes and for two different bound ary conditions, namely the usual cubic periodic boundary conditions an d the isotropic hyperspherical boundary conditions for which the parti cles evolve on the surface of a hypersphere in four dimensions. Our re sults show that for small system sizes, crystallization can indeed be induced by the cubic boundary conditions. On the other hand, we show t hat finite-size effects are more pronounced on the hypersphere and tha t crystallization is artificially inhibited even for large system size s.