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<br/>sputtering techniques have been developed that enable the experimental<br/>characterization of the glass-forming ability (GFA) of thousands of<br/>alloys simultaneously. In this work, we classify the atomic structure<br/>as amorphous or crystalline for all binary alloys formed from Cu, Al,<br/>Mg, and Ni obtained from sputtering experiments. We compare the<br/>experimental results to those from molecular dynamics simulations<br/>aimed at calculating the GFA of these binary alloys using inter-atomic<br/>energy functions that span a wide range of resolutions, including the<br/>pairwise Lennard-Jones and patchy particle potentials and many-body<br/>embedded atom method (EAM) and modified EAM potentials. We show that<br/>the GFA for all of the the binary alloys that we consider can be<br/>accurately modeled using the pairwise patchy particle potential.