Common structural basis of short- and long-time relaxation dynamics in metallic glass-forming liquids

Abstract

Classical molecular dynamics simulations were performed for five model metallic glass-forming liquids to investigate the structure correlation with both short-time β and long-time α relaxation dynamics. It is found that Debye-Waller factor characterizing the short-time β relaxation decreases with increasing five-fold local symmetry in atomic clusters, following a power-law behavior. It is also found that the equation of Debye-Waller factor and α-relaxation time, which is widely studied in polymer systems, is applicable in metallic glass-forming systems as well. Furthermore, a new equation is derived for the five-fold local symmetry and α-relaxation time, which describes the simulated data very well. These findings indicate that there exist a common structural basis for both the short-time β-relaxation and the long-time α-relaxation dynamics.