Research Highlights

Amorphous/glassy materials have superior mechanical, chemical, biological, and magnetic properties because of their unique structures and lack of long-range order. However, these unique structural features also make the formative processes of amorphous materials (e.g., glass-transition, structural changes in a liquid upon supercooling, etc.) difficult to understand.

Recent works on liquid-to-glass transitions have made tremendous progress, such as the 2022 article by Louzguine and Ojovan¹. This paper combined molecular dynamics simulation, theoretical calculation, and X-ray diffraction to relate the structural changes of cooling Cu melts in terms of configurons (broken Cu–Cu bonds). This strategy was able to depict the reverse transition of Cu from glass to the supercooled liquid state on heating as the onset of configuron percolation clusters.

Since the 2022 article, the authors have expanded this approach to investigate the structural changes of metallic glass-forming liquids in general, focusing on understanding liquid fragility (non-Arrhenius temperature dependence of the liquid viscosity)². Current research explains the liquid fragility of glass-forming materials using the structural changes in liquids upon supercooling.

“How exactly do liquids undergo glass transition is still a subject of intense research interest in condensed matter physics,” says Prof. Louzguine. “A breakthrough that can visualize this process will also bring us closer to understanding other effects, such as liquid fragility, making the fabrication of amorphous materials with tailored properties possible.”

(Author: Patrick Han)