Abstract
An amorphous alloy is defined as a solid with the lack of a long-range atomic order. The failure of the Bloch theorem is immediately deduced from this definition and can explain the possession of high electrical resistivities in amorphous alloys. However, studies of the local atomic structure of amorphous alloys have been extensively carried out since early 1980's and have led to the conclusion that certain short range order always develops in amorphous alloys. As its natural consequence, attention has been directed to its effect on various physical properties in the last decade. The discovery of quasicrystals in 1984 has certainly stimulated the research along this line, since quasicrystals are characterized by the absence of the translational symmetry but with the well-developed atomic order. In the present article, we demonstrate clearly how the short-range atomic structure affects the electron transport properties by analyzing the data associated with the metal-insulator transition for amorphous V-Si alloys. A unified picture for the electron transport mechanism for metallic solids, which include amorphous alloys, quasicrystals, approximants and crystals, is proposed.
