Abstract
Rare earth oxides have shown great promise in a variety of applications in their own right, and as the building blocks of complex oxides. A great deal of recent interest has been focused on Sm₂O₃, which has shown significant promise as a high-k dielectric and as a ReRAM dielectric. Experimentally, these thin films range from amorphous, through partially crystalline, to poly-crystalline, dependent upon the synthetic conditions. Each case presents a set of modelling challenges that need to be defined and overcome. In this work, the problem of modelling amorphous Sm₂O₃ is tackled, developing an atomistic picture of the effect of amorphization on Sm₂O₃ from a structural and electronic structure perspective.