Persistence of Covalent Bonding in Liquid Silicon Probed by Inelastic   X-ray Scattering
  Metallic liquid silicon at 1787K is investigated using x-ray Compton scattering. An excellent agreement is found between the measurements and the corresponding Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics simulations. Our results show persistence of covalent bonding in liquid silicon and provide support for the occurrence of theoretically predicted liquid-liquid phase transition in supercooled liquid states. The population of covalent bond pairs in liquid silicon is estimated to be 17% via a maximally-localized Wannier function analysis. Compton scattering is shown to be a sensitive probe of bonding effects in the liquid state. 
J. T. Okada, P. H.-L. Sit, Y. Watanabe, Y. J. Wang, B. Barbiellini, T.   Ishikawa, M. Itou, Y. Sakurai, A. Bansil, R. Ishika...
cond-mat.mtrl-sci