Studying anisotropies in vapor-deposited metallic glasses

We propose to continue our investigation of the structural anisotropies in bulk metallic glasses with X-ray nano-diffraction. Our initial experiment at ID16B revealed large and unexpected structural anisotropies discovered by analyzing the full 2D diffraction pattern. The patterns showed large intensity variations as a function of the azimuthal angle. The results of the studies we propose on several samples with different growth conditions and degrees of stability can inform the relationship between the observed anisotropies and important properties of metallic glasses, pointing to the need to have structural information beyond the density-density pair distribution function. Further, these studies may provide new information relevant to the glass transition, a long-standing open question in condensed matter physics.