A general approach to the dynamics of structural relaxation in amorphous material was developed. A form was chosen, for the recombination kinetics of defects, which avoided the common  ad hoc  assumption that defects recombined only with others which had an identical activation energy. The generalized approach was tested quantitatively by modelling the structural relaxation of amorphous Si and by comparing the results with experimental data. It was found that the generalized recombination kinetics formalism was necessary in order to describe time-resolved relaxation data accurately.

J.H.Shin, H.A.Atwater: Philosophical Magazine B, 1995, 72[1], 1-11