High entropy metallic glasses: Glass formation, crystallization and properties

Abstract

The metallic glasses (MGs) and high entropy alloys (HEAs) have drawn great attention due to their remarkable features such as high hardness, strength and elasticity in MGs, and significant tensile ductility in HEAs. These great merits are attributed to the disorder atomic arrangement in MGs or simple crystalline phases with the face centred cubic structure in HEAs. However, MGs and HEAs have been demonstrated to be brittle and low strength, respectively. To date, many attempts have devoted to resolve these pressing issues. For MGs, the concept of transformation-induced plasticity or heterogeneous atomic arrangement have been introduced to enhance ductility and to activate work-hardening while the enhancement of tensile strength in HEAs has been the hot subject. Recently, various deformation mechanisms have been proposed to enhance yield/fracture strength without sacrificing much tensile ductility. The high entropy metallic glasses (HE-MGs), combining the features of both metallic glasses and high entropy alloys, appeared recently and have become the focal point. Hence, to promote this new field, it is useful to summarize the recently progress of HE-MGs. This review briefly presents a summary of HE-MGs regarding on glass formation, magnetic properties, crystallization and mechanical properties.