Abstract: First discovered in 1960, metallic glasses have been intensively studied in the last few decades. Comparing with their crystalline counterparts, metallic glasses exhibit some excellent mechanical and physical properties, which make this new kind of materials attractive in a lot of practical applications. Moreover, as one of the typical and simple systems of amorphous materials, metallic glass is seen as a good model system for investigating the fundamental problems in non-crystalline state physics. Not only the obstacles for application of this particular material could be removed, but also the great advance in condensed matter physics would be obtained if the now fundamental problems in metallic glasses, such as structure, deformation, glass transition, glass formation ability and so on could be solved.

Key words: metallic glass, non-crystalline state physics, amorphous material, glass transition