Unveiling the atomic deformation in highly strained metallic glass thin films

Metallic glasses are materials presenting impressive mechanical properties with high yield strength, good hardness and toughness properties. The major drawback for use in products remains their low ductility (at room temperature). Because of the lack of atomic long range order, these materials are intuitively not expected to undergo modification of their mechanical behaviours with down-sizing. However, atomic-scale deformation events are suspected to play a key role in the unexpected capability of metallic glasses to deform plastically when designed in the form of very small samples, such as thin films, without any clear general consensus concerning the fundamental mechanisms. This proposal combines the mechanical characterization of ZrNi thin film metallic glasses (TFMG) in tension with the unique nano-diffraction strain mapping technique available at ID01 to study the fundamental mechanisms governing the deformation of metallic glasses, more specifically at the sub-micron scale.