Metallic glass nanostructures of tunable shape and composition

Yanhui Liu,Yanglin Li,Sungwoo Sohn,Jingbei Liu,Judy J Cha,Jan Schroers

doi:10.1038/ncomms8043

Yanhui Liu, Yanglin Li + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms8043

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Journal: Nature Communications	Publication Date: Apr 22, 2015
Citations: 65	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Yale University, Interface (United States)

Abstract

Metals of hybrid nano-/microstructures are of broad technological and fundamental interests. Manipulation of shape and composition on the nanoscale, however, is challenging, especially for multicomponent alloys such as metallic glasses. Although top–down approaches have demonstrated nanomoulding, they are limited to very few alloy systems. Here we report a facile method to synthesize metallic glass nanoarchitectures that can be applied to a broad range of glass-forming alloys. This strategy, using multitarget carousel oblique angle deposition, offers the opportunity to achieve control over size, shape and composition of complex alloys at the nanoscale. As a consequence, nanostructures of programmable three-dimensional shapes and tunable compositions are realized on wafer scale for metallic glasses including the marginal glass formers. Realizing nanostructures in a wide compositional range allows chemistry optimization for technological usage of metallic glass nanostructures, and also enables the fundamental study on size, composition and fabrication dependences of metallic glass properties.

Highlights

Metals of hybrid nano-/microstructures are of broad technological and fundamental interests
In contrast to the usual oblique angle deposition[18,19], which is known as glancing angle deposition and has been utilized to produce nanoarchitectures of simple chemistry[22,23], multi-COAD comprises three sputtering targets arranged in a confocal geometry
The multi-COAD approach demonstrates the facile fabrication of a wide variety of metallic glass nanoarchitectures of complex 3D shapes and hybrid chemistry

Summary

Introduction

Metals of hybrid nano-/microstructures are of broad technological and fundamental interests. For the successful synthesis of NMGs via nanomoulding, the metallic glass must possess a combination of specific properties such as sufficient wetting of the mould, quantified by a wetting angle of below 140°, low oxidation rate and a large thermoplasticforming ability[8] Such properties are required to fill nanoscale moulds of high aspect ratio before termination of this process by crystallization[14]. We introduce a bottom-up method based on multitarget carousel oblique angle deposition (multi-COAD) to fabricate NMG architectures of tunable chemistry and controllable threedimensional (3D) shapes The versatility of this approach allows us to realize, at high yields, NMGs in a broad range of compositions

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