Foreword

As a new class of advanced materials, metallic glasses （also often referred as amorphous alloys） possess a combination of unique amorphous structure and remarkably impressive mechanical and physical properties, and are now at the cutting edge of research. The emergence of bulk metallic glasses （BMGs） provides more alloy compositions, large geometric size and diverse mechanical behaviors for some fundamental issues such as deformation and fracture mechanisms of glassy materials and potentiates possibly great applications. In particular, the BMG-s exhibit many unique mechanical properties, such as superior strength and hardness, excellent scratch and wear resistance, extremely high elastic limit, and diverse fracture toughness （varying significantly from approaching ideal brittleness like the oxide glasses for Mg-based BMGs to the highest known damage tolerance for Pd-based BMGs） and patterns （such as dimple structures, nanoscale periodic corrugations, and fiver patterns）. It has become possible to experimentally characterize the mechanical behaviors of metallic glasses and to explore their correlations with the processing conditions, structures and other properties, and accordingly in a more general sense, to understand the deformation, energy dissipation, and fracture mechanisms in the disordered glassy materials. The important and interesting mechanical properties and deformation mechanisms are currently the focus of intense research in the material science community, and the corresponding studies on them are progressing at a fast pace.