| Abstract Scope |
By means of flash calorimetry, we investigated the glass formation in two different bulk metallic glass-forming systems in a wide range of timescales and sample sizes [1,2].
We observe size dependent vitrification kinetics for the smallest samples. In contrast, the atomic mobility, i.e., is the rate of spontaneous fluctuations taking place in the unperturbed supercooled liquid at equilibrium, remains bulk-like for all investigated samples. The work shows that vitrification in samples having sizes below 10 μm can take place at temperatures up to 40 K lower than in bulk samples.
The important implication of this pronounced reduction in glass transition temperature is that mild reductions of the sample size in metallic glasses may allow exploring thermodynamic states deep down in the energy landscape.
[1] V. Di Lisio, et al., Nature Commun. (2023) in revision.
[2] X. Monnier, et al., Sci. Adv. 6, eaay1454 (2020). |