2008 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Atomistic Theory Of Metallic Liquids and Glasses
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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.