The nature of the glassy state is always one of the most exciting and fundamental issues in condensed matter physics
and materials science. Metallic glasses provide ideal models for investigating amorphous physics due to the simple metal bonding
and close-packed structure. Studies have found various orders in metallic glasses, among which medium-range order structures
play an increasingly critical role in the phase transformation and deformation of amorphous alloys. However, the existing theories
or experimental results are challenging to determine whether there is a structural connection between the amorphous state and its
corresponding crystalline state in the medium range or more extensive length scale range. Moreover, the existing characterization
methods are difficult to accurately analyze its short-range to medium-range order structure, further compounding its issue. Most
recently, a unique metastable cubic phase has been found as an essential intermediate state during the heating process before
crystallization in a classic bulk metallic glass Pd-Ni-P, and a hidden chiral medium-range structure bridging the amorphous state,
and the crystalline state was captured and deciphered from the metastable cube phase. The medium-range structure is named the sixmembered tricapped trigonal prism (6M-TTP) cluster. This structure’s short-range clusters are organized as a peculiar chiral structure
to form a medium-range building block with about 12.5 Å. The 6M-TTP clusters tend to randomly pack to be long-range disordered
structures in the as-cast state and later transform to be an ordered cubic metastable phase at a certain temperature. In order to reveal
the nature of the amorphous structure, a new structural model is provided, and a new explanation is proposed for the precipitation
kinetics of metastable mesophase in metallic glasses. These findings will help clarify the structural arrangement of metallic glasses in
the medium-range and even more extensive length scales. Our findings would shed light on capture and decipher more building blocks
of medium-range ordering in amorphous alloys and would help solve the long-standing issue of amorphous structures.
GE Jiacheng, LIU Sinan, LAN Si, WANG Xunli
. Solving the structural mystery of glass: A medium-range structure motif linking
amorphous and crystalline states[J]. Chinese Journal of Nature, 2022
, 44(1)
: 57
-71
.
DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.0253-9608.2022.01.006