Metallic glasses

Metallic glasses are a new class of materials produced by rapidly quenching the melts at rates often exceeding a million deg/sec. These have been found to display an optimum combination of properties such as high strength, good bend ductility, improved corrosion resistance and excellent soft magnetic properties. Thus, metallic glasses are emerging as economically viable competitors to conventional engineering materials. A clear understanding of the atomic structure of metallic glasses and its change during annealing are of prime importance. Although techniques such as field-ion microscopy (fim) x-ray diffraction and small angle x-ray scattering have been employed for this purpose, high resolution electron microscopic (hrem) investigations conducted during the last few years aided greatly in deriving information on the atomic scale. Availability of high-voltage high-resolution electron microscopes has been mainly responsible for this happy situation. Studies on several metallic glasses have revealed thathrem images contain well-defined pattern of fringes over local regions, even though the diffraction pattern is that of a typical amorphous structure. The details of structure in the early stages of crystallization derived throughhrem, fim and analytical microscopic techniques are presented and discussed.