Predicting the Glass Forming Ability of Binary Alloys

Metallic glasses represent a promising materials class because they possess larger values of the strength and elastic limit compared to conventional crystalline alloys. However, there are an exponentially large number of possible glass-forming alloys, but it is currently extremely difficult to predict those that will form glasses at experimentally accessible cooling rates. Recently, combinatorial
sputtering techniques have been developed that enable the experimental
characterization of the glass-forming ability (GFA) of thousands of
alloys simultaneously. In this work, we classify the atomic structure
as amorphous or crystalline for all binary alloys formed from Cu, Al,
Mg, and Ni obtained from sputtering experiments. We compare the
experimental results to those from molecular dynamics simulations
aimed at calculating the GFA of these binary alloys using inter-atomic
energy functions that span a wide range of resolutions, including the
pairwise Lennard-Jones and patchy particle potentials and many-body
embedded atom method (EAM) and modified EAM potentials. We show that
the GFA for all of the the binary alloys that we consider can be
accurately modeled using the pairwise patchy particle potential.