Fifty years of amorphous silicon models : the end of the story?

Ninety years after Zachariasen introduced the concept of continuous random network to describe glassy materials and fifty years after Polk presented his celebrated, patiently hand-made model of amorphous silicon (a-Si) in the Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids, a review of the considerable progress accomplished in modeling a-Si is presented. While models of unprecedented quality have been introduced in recent years, reconciliation with experiment is still not totally complete.