The idea of rigid unit modes was developed for crystalline materials to enable an understanding of the origin of displacive phase transitions in materials such as silicates, which can be described as infinite three-dimensional networks of corner-lined SiO and AlO tetrahedra. The idea was that rigid unit modes could act as the soft modes for displacive phase transitions.
The original work in silicates showed that many of the phase transitions in silicates could be understood in terms of soft modes that are RUMs.
After the original work on displacive phase transitions, the RUM model was also applied to understanding the nature of the disordered high-temperature phases of materials such as cristobalite, the dynamics and localised structural distortions in zeolites, and negative thermal expansion.