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Breaking the vitrification limitation of monatomic metals

Nature Materials volume 23, pages 1193–1199 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The question of whether all materials can solidify into the glassy form proposed by Turnbull half a century ago remains unsolved. Some of the simplest systems of monatomic metals have not been vitrified, especially the close-packed face-centred cubic metals. Here we report the vitrification of gold, which is notoriously difficult to be vitrified, and several similar close-packed face-centred cubic and hexagonal metals using a method of picosecond pulsed laser ablation in a liquid medium. The vitrification occurs through the rapid cooling during laser ablation and the inhibition of nucleation by the liquid medium. Using this method, a large number of atomic configurations, including glassy configurations, can be generated simultaneously, from which a stable glass state can be sampled. Simulations demonstrate that the favourable stability of monatomic metals stems from the strong topological frustration of icosahedra-like clusters. Our work breaks the limitation of the glass-forming ability of matter, indicating that vitrification is an intrinsic property of matter and providing a strategy for the preparation and design of metallic glasses from an atomic configuration perspective.

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Fig. 1: Illustration of a laser-aided ultrafast quenching approach in ethanol medium and the preparation of fcc (Au) and hcp (Ru) MMG NPs.
Fig. 2: The devitrification process of MMGs.
Fig. 3: Extensive preparation of MMG NPs from monatomic metals that include bcc, hcp and fcc metals.
Fig. 4: Effect of the liquid medium and the origin of stability disclosed via MD simulations.

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All data that support the findings of this study are available within the article and its Supplementary Information.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Guangdong Major Project of Basic and Applied Basic Research, China (grant number 2019B030302010 (H.-Y.B.)), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 52192601 (H.-Y.B.), 52192602 (H.-Y.B.), 52071222 (H.-B.K.), 61888102 (W.-H.W.), 11790291 (W.-H.W.), 22172003 (J.Z.), 52001219 (X.T.), 52301214 (H.-P.Z.) and 52130108 (B.-S.S.)) and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB30000000 (W.-H.W.)). We acknowledge the computational resource provided by the Platform for Data-Driven Computational Materials Discovery of Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory. We acknowledge M.-J. Zou and X.-L. Ma of the Bay Area Centre for Electron Microscopy at Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory for the use of the double spherical aberration-corrected Thermo Fisher Spectra 300 instrument, and the Electron Microscopy Laboratory at Peking University for the use of aberration-corrected Titan3 Themis G2 200 instrument.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Xing Tong, Yue-E Zhang.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, Dongguan, China

    Xing Tong, Yue-E Zhang, Bao-Shuang Shang, Hua-Ping Zhang, Yan-Hui Liu, Yong Zhao, Bo Zhang, Hai-Bo Ke, Hai-Yang Bai & Wei-Hua Wang

  2. College of Physics, Liaoning University, Shenyang, China

    Yue-E Zhang

  3. Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Zezhou Li, Yao Zhang & Jihan Zhou

  4. Laboratory for Microstructures, Institute of Materials, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

    Gang Wang

  5. Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yan-Hui Liu, Hai-Yang Bai & Wei-Hua Wang

  6. Center of Materials Science and Optoelectronics Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Hai-Yang Bai & Wei-Hua Wang

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Contributions

H.-Y.B. and W.-H.W. supervised the work. X.T., W.-H.W., J.Z. and H.-Y.B. designed the experiments. Y.-E.Z. and X.T. operated the laser ablation. X.T., Y.-E.Z., G.W., Z.L., Y. Zhang and J.Z. carried out the electron microscopy experiments. Y.-E.Z. performed the XPS tests. B.-S.S., H.-P.Z., Z.L., J.Z., H.-Y.B. and W.-H.W. performed the modelling and simulations. H.-Y.B., X.T., H.-P.Z., B.-S.S. and J.Z. wrote the manuscript. H.-Y.B. and X.T. responded to the reviewers’ comments. B.Z., Y.-H.L., Y. Zhao and H.-B.K. participated in discussions. All of the authors contributed to the analysis and interpretation of the data.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Hai-Bo Ke, Jihan Zhou or Hai-Yang Bai.

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Nature Materials thanks Howard Sheng and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–10, Notes, Tables 1–3 and caption for Supplementary Video 1.

Supplementary Video 1

The devitrification process of amorphous Au can be observed using HR-TEM in situ, during which crystallization occurred epitaxially from the lattice of the crystal Au particle. Some frames of the video are extracted and displayed in Fig. 2a.

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Tong, X., Zhang, YE., Shang, BS. et al. Breaking the vitrification limitation of monatomic metals. Nat. Mater. 23, 1193–1199 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-024-01967-0

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