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Local elastic properties of a metallic glass

Nature Materials volume 10, pages 439–442 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

The nature of non-crystalline materials causes the local potential energy of a cluster of atoms or molecules to vary significantly in space. Different configurations of an ensemble of atoms in a metallic glass lead therefore to a distribution of elastic constants which also changes in space. This is totally different to their crystalline counterparts, where a long-range order exists in space and therefore a much more unified elastic modulus is expected. Using atomic force acoustic microscopy, we present data which show that the local so-called indentation modulus M indeed exhibits a wide distribution on a scale below 10 nm in amorphous PdCuSi, with Δ M/M≈30%. About 104 atoms are probed in an individual measurement. Crystallized PdCuSi shows a variation that is 10–30 times smaller and which is determined by the resolution of the microscope and by the polycrystalline structure of the material.

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Figure 1: Maps (C-scans) of contact-resonance frequencies.
Figure 2: Statistics of AFAM data.

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Acknowledgements

We thank P. Yuya and J. Turner, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, for carrying out nano-indentation measurements on our PdCuSi samples. B.Z. thanks the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for support with a post-doctoral fellowship. W.A. thanks M. Kopycinska-Müller for discussions. This work was supported by the German Science Foundation within the ‘SFB 602’ and the Leibniz-Program (Sa 337/10-1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Physikalisches Institut, Universität Göttingen, D-37077 Göttingen, Germany

    Hannes Wagner, Dennis Bedorf, Stefan Küchemann, Moritz Schwabe, Bo Zhang, Walter Arnold & Konrad Samwer

  2. Department of Materials and Materials Technology, Saarland University, Campus D 2.2, D-66123 Saarbrücken, Germany

    Walter Arnold

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  1. Hannes Wagner
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Contributions

H.W. carried out the experiments, analysed the data, and contributed to writing the paper. W.A. devised the experiment, wrote part of the paper, and analysed the data. S.K. provide the global elastic data. D.B. wrote part of the paper and analysed the data. M.S. prepared the samples. B.Z. continued with the measurement after H.W. left. K.S. wrote part of the paper and supervised the team.

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Correspondence to Konrad Samwer.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Wagner, H., Bedorf, D., Küchemann, S. et al. Local elastic properties of a metallic glass. Nature Mater 10, 439–442 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3024

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