Structure of Mg- and Zr-based metallic glasses under ultra-high pressure

The proposed project addresses new thermodynamic path to obtain a high-density amorphous state of glass-forming Mg- and Zr-based alloys through the compression of these materials in a diamond anvil cell (DAC) up to about 100 GPa. This approach is likely to open new possibilities for bulk metallic glass formation. The proposed path involves compression of the supercooled liquid to reach the glass transition temperature Tg, followed by isobaric cooling. Our main goal is to obtain bulk metallic glasses from Mg-Gd and Zr-Cu based alloys under ultra-high pressure and to determine the shift in glass transition temperature as well as the change of the critical glass forming cooling rate. Temperature Tg is to be detected, while changes in the alloys’ short-range order will be studied in-situ by synchrotron pair distribution function (PDF) and a high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (after sample recovery).