Structural evolution during fragile-to-strong transition in CuZr(Al) glass-forming liquids

Chao Zhou; Lina Hu; Qijing Sun; Haijiao Zheng; Chunzhi Zhang; Yuanzheng Yue

doi:10.1063/1.4907374

Structural evolution during fragile-to-strong transition in CuZr(Al) glass-forming liquids

J Chem Phys. 2015 Feb 14;142(6):064508. doi: 10.1063/1.4907374.

Authors

Chao Zhou¹, Lina Hu¹, Qijing Sun¹, Haijiao Zheng¹, Chunzhi Zhang², Yuanzheng Yue¹

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory for Liquid-Solid Structural Evolution and Processing of Materials (Ministry of Education), Shandong University, Jinan 250061, China.
² School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266590, China.

PMID: 25681924
DOI: 10.1063/1.4907374

Abstract

In the present work, we show experimental evidence for the dynamic fragile-to-strong (F-S) transition in a series of CuZr(Al) glass-forming liquids (GFLs). A detailed analysis of the dynamics of 98 glass-forming liquids indicates that the F-S transition occurs around Tf-s ≈ 1.36 Tg. Using the hyperquenching-annealing-x-ray scattering approach, we have observed a three-stage evolution pattern of medium-range ordering (MRO) structures during the F-S transition, indicating a dramatic change of the MRO clusters around Tf-s upon cooling. The F-S transition in CuZr(Al) GFLs is attributed to the competition among the MRO clusters composed of different locally ordering configurations. A phenomenological scenario has been proposed to explain the structural evolution from the fragile to the strong phase in the CuZr(Al) GFLs.