Point and line defects in glasses

Recently, geometrical, dynamical and topological arguments have been used to analyse the possible classes of defects in glasses. The results predict that there are no dislocations, that lines of disclinations may exist but should thread through the lattice via rings with an odd number of bonds, and that the disclinations are characterized by oddness rather than intensity. In this paper, it is pointed out that topological arguments cannot be properly applied to the case of glasses and that the predictions of the dynamical and topological arguments disagree with results found in computer-built continuous-random-network and dense-random-packed models of glasses. © 1981 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.