Abstract
It is difficult to characterize by experiment the structural features of liquids and glasses which lack long-range translational periodicity in the structure. Here, we suggest that the height and shape of the first peak of the structure function S(Q) carry significant information about the nature of the medium-range order and the coherence of density correlations. It is further proposed that they indicate how ideal the liquid structure is. Here, the ideal state is defined by long-range density correlations, not by structural coherence at the atomic level. The analysis is applied to the S(Q) of metallic alloy liquids determined by x-ray diffraction and simulation. The ideality index defined here may provide a common parameter to characterize structural coherence among various disparate groups of liquids and glasses.
