Computer Simulations of the Dynamics of Amorphous Silica

We present the results of a large scale computer simulation we performed to investigate the dynamical properties of supercooled silica. We show that parallel supercomputers such as the CRAY-T3E are very well suited to solve these type of problems. We find that at low temperatures the transport properties such as the diffusion constants and the viscosity agree well with the experimental data. At high temperatures this simulation predicts that in the transport quantities significant deviations from the Arrhenius law should be observed. Finally we show that such types of simulations can be used to investigate also complex dynamical quantities, such as the dynamical structure factor, and that the wave-vector and frequency range accessible is significantly larger than the one of real experiments.