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While collapsibility of CW complexes dates back to the 1930s, collapsibility of directed Euclidean cubical complexes has not been well studied to date. The classical definition of collapsibility involves certain conditions on pairs of cells of the complex. The direction of the space can be taken into account by requiring that the past links of vertices remain homotopy equivalent after collapsing. We call this type of collapse a link-preserving directed collapse. In the undirected setting, pairs of cells are removed that create a deformation retract. In the directed setting, topological properties---in particular, properties of spaces of directed paths---are not always preserved. In this paper, we give computationally simple conditions for preserving the topology of past links. Furthermore, we give conditions for when link-preserving directed collapses preserve the contractability and connectedness of spaces of directed paths. Throughout, we provide illustrative examples. 

Despite the numerous technological applications of amorphous materials, such as glasses, the understanding of their medium-range order (MRO) structure—and particularly the origin of the first sharp diffraction peak (FSDP) in the structure factor—remains elusive. Here, we use persistent homology, an emergent type of topological data analysis, to understand MRO structure in sodium silicate glasses. To enable this analysis, we introduce a self-consistent categorization of rings with rigorous geometrical definitions of the structural entities. Furthermore, we enable quantitative comparison of the persistence diagrams by computing the cumulative sum of all points weighted by their lifetime. On the basis of these analysis methods, we show that the approach can be used to deconvolute the contributions of various MRO features to the FSDP. More generally, the developed methodology can be applied to analyze and categorize molecular dynamics data and understand MRO structure in any class of amorphous solids.