Atomistic Theory Of Metallic Liquids and Glasses

When we try to find out the structure–property relationships for metallic glasses, we feel lost and have trouble knowing where to begin, because describing the atomic structure of a glass is already a major challenge. The structure of glass is called

amorphous

, meaning shapeless, a term that refuses rigorous characterization. Actually it is a great accidental gift of nature that many substances are crystalline, so that we can discuss their structure in such a simple way, such as the lattice, symmetry, and the unit cell, even though there are so many, of the order of 10 atoms cm

-3

in a crystal. In this chapter, we start with the most basic question of how to describe the structure of liquids and glasses, and discuss how we can start constructing a theory that can describe the structure–property relationships of metallic glasses. We will take a local, rather than global, view of the structure, and consider how the local structure is related to the local properties.