Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Ames Laboratory have discovered the underlying order in metallic glasses, which may hold the key to the ability to create new high-tech alloys with specific properties.
Glass materials may have a far less randomly arranged structure than formerly thought.
Over the years, the ideas of how metallic glasses form have been evolving, from just a random packing, to very small ordered clusters, to realizing that longer range chemical and topological order exists.
But by studying the structure of a metallic glass alloy formed at varying cooling rates, Matthew Kramer (in the photo at left) and his team of fellow scientists at the Ames Laboratory have been able to show there is some organization to these structures. These findings were recently published in Scientific Reports, and in a second paper in Physical Review Letters with Paul Voyles’ team from University of Madison, Wisc.
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