Structural origin of aging-induced relaxations in bulk metallic glasses

Metallic glasses (MGs) exceptionally combine the strength and elasticity of metals with an amorphous structure, producing amongst the strongest and toughest metals known. Despite their exceptional properties, MGs face a serious problem: they are inherently metastable and known to exhibit abrupt und currently unpredictable property losses such as ageing-induced embrittlement, an experimental observation that lacks a structural understanding. The element-specific X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) technique could be leveraged in this direction, allowing probing structural evolutions in MGs experimentally around individual alloy components. Preliminary XAS data show clear atomic rearrangements as a function of time and temperature around Zr in a Zr-Cu-Al alloy, leading us to the idea of further explore the time-temperature-transformation diagram in the proposed experiment.