Understanding the changes in ductility and Poisson's ratio of metallic glasses during annealing from microscopic dynamics

Abstract

In the paper K. L. Ngai et al., [J. Chem. 140, 044511 (2014)], the empirical correlation of ductility with the Poisson's ratio, νPoisson, found in metallic glasses was theoretically explained by microscopic dynamic processes which link on the one hand ductility, and on the other hand the Poisson's ratio. Specifically, the dynamic processes are the primitive relaxation in the Coupling Model which is the precursor of the Johari–Goldstein β-relaxation, and the caged atoms dynamics characterized by the effective Debye–Waller factor f0 or equivalently the nearly constant loss (NCL) in susceptibility. All these processes and the parameters characterizing them are accessible experimentally except f0 or the NCL of caged atoms; thus, so far, the experimental verification of the explanation of the correlation between ductility and Poisson's ratio is incomplete. In the experimental part of this paper, we report dynamic mechanical measurement of the NCL of the metallic glass La60Ni15Al25 as-cast, and the changes by annealing at temperature below Tg. The observed monotonic decrease of the NCL with aging time, reflecting the corresponding increase of f0, correlates with the decrease of νPoisson. This is important observation because such measurements, not made before, provide the missing link in confirming by experiment the explanation of the correlation of ductility with νPoisson. On aging the metallic glass, also observed in the isochronal loss spectra is the shift of the β-relaxation to higher temperatures and reduction of the relaxation strength. These concomitant changes of the β-relaxation and NCL are the root cause of embrittlement by aging the metallic glass. The NCL of caged atoms is terminated by the onset of the primitive relaxation in the Coupling Model, which is generally supported by experiments. From this relation, the monotonic decrease of the NCL with aging time is caused by the slowing down of the primitive relaxation and β-relaxation on annealing, and vice versa.