Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2011
Inspired by the experiments of Turnbull (1952) on undercooled liquid mercury, many investigators have argued that polytetrahedral short-range order is an important ingredient in the structure of undercooled liquids and metallic glasses. A paradigm for such order is “polytope {3,3,5},” which is a regular lattice of 600 perfect tetrahedra with an icosahedral point symmetry embedded on the surface of a four-dimensional sphere. We present results for the band structure of polytope {3,3,5} in the presence of disclinations, and compare them with band structures obtained from dense random packing models of metallic glasses.