The nature of liquid structures with their changing behaviors remains an unsolved fundamental problem in many fields of science and technology. It has been widely accepted that liquid structures change gradually with temperature and/or pressure. With x-ray diffraction in the melt In-Sn80, however, we have confirmed that a temperature-dependent discontinuous structural change could occur in some binary liquids, which does not fall into any other up-to-date recognized liquid-liquid changes. This finding, together with the recently recognized pressure-induced liquid change, suggests that the conventional view on liquids should be revised.
We propose a concept for the prediction of the glass-forming ability (GFA) before quenching through studies of the stabilization of clusters in metallic liquids in terms of a parameter, B=dr∕dT (r is the correlation radius of clusters and T is the absolute temperature). Strong correlation between B and GFA was found for a broad range of alloy systems. When the absolute value of B is lower than 1×10−4nm∕K, the metallic liquid can be prepared into a metallic glass. This criterion is important for studies of glass-forming abilities of metallic liquids in the future.
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