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Tuning order in disorder

Nature Materials volume 14, pages 547–552 (2015)Cite this article

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Recent research has revealed considerable diversity in the short-range ordering of metallic glass, identifying favoured and unfavoured local atomic configurations coexisting in an inhomogeneous amorphous structure. Tailoring the population of these local motifs may selectively enhance a desired property.

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Figure 1: Local structural variation in an MG versus a crystalline metal.
Figure 2: Coordination polyhedra distribution in a metallic glass.
Figure 3: Atomic contributions to soft vibrational modes in simulated Cu64Zr36 MG.
Figure 4: Contour maps showing the heterogeneous spatial distribution of Cu and Zr atoms that participate the most in soft modes, correlated with those that contribute the most to deformation strain.

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Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges contributions from J. Ding, Y. Q. Cheng, H. W. Sheng and M. L. Falk, and support from the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering, under contract no. DE-FG02-09ER46056.

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  1. Evan Ma is in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA,

    Evan Ma

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Ma, E. Tuning order in disorder. Nature Mater 14, 547–552 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4300

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