Supercluster-coupled crystal growth in metallic glass forming liquids.

Nat Commun

Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06511, USA.

Published: February 2019

AI Article Synopsis

  • Researchers conducted experiments on metallic glass nanorods to investigate how structural ordering affects crystal growth, which is typically overlooked in standard growth models.
  • They observed that heating the nanorods alters their internal structure, leading to the formation of small clusters that promote faster crystal growth.
  • The study suggests that the growth rate asymmetry between rods that are heated and cooled decreases with smaller rod sizes, indicating that structural ordering is a key factor in enhancing crystal growth.

Article Abstract

While common growth models assume a structure-less liquid composed of atomic flow units, structural ordering has been shown in liquid metals. Here, we conduct in situ transmission electron microscopy crystallization experiments on metallic glass nanorods, and show that structural ordering strongly affects crystal growth and is controlled by nanorod thermal history. Direct visualization reveals structural ordering as densely populated small clusters in a nanorod heated from the glass state, and similar behavior is found in molecular dynamics simulations of model metallic glasses. At the same growth temperature, the asymmetry in growth rate for rods that are heated versus cooled decreases with nanorod diameter and vanishes for very small rods. We hypothesize that structural ordering enhances crystal growth, in contrast to assumptions from common growth models. The asymmetric growth rate is attributed to the difference in the degree of the structural ordering, which is pronounced in the heated glass but sparse in the cooled liquid.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6385493PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-08898-4DOI Listing

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