Common errors of applying the Voronoi tessellation technique to metallic glasses

The Voronoi tessellation technique is one of the most useful tools to analyze atomic structures such as the short-range order of icosahedra in metallic glasses. In the ordinary Voronoi tessellation technique, the polyhedral plane is placed halfway between two atoms of different size. However, this essentially creates analytical errors. An alternative approach, called the radical plane method, takes the atomic size difference into consideration. Here, the method is applied to metallic glasses with different compositions and compared to the ordinary Voronoi tessellation technique. The results show that properties such as the Voronoi index and the spatial distribution of icosahedra analyzed by the ordinary Voronoi tessellation technique may be entirely incorrect.