Understanding the metallic glasses formation by applying a centrality measure based on betweenness

Abstract

Key nodes have a significant impact, both structural and functional, on complex networks. Evaluating the importance of a node, from an information flow perspective, has applications in many areas but, to a great extent, they are focused on the shortest path perspective. Then, there exist measures based on the representation of the frequency in which each node plays the role of a transition node by random trajectories between two other nodes. Development of a specific kind of material, metallic glasses, has been mainly based on trial and error methods and, this approach is inefficient in terms of time and cost. Therefore, the development of new approaches for metallic glasses design remains an open topic for researchers in this field. The understanding of the role of each element could be useful for the generation of new metallic glasses and the improvement of existing ones. This work aims to study the formation capacity of metallic glass from the point of view of complex networks, using random walk betweenness centrality approaches, as well as the proposal of a new hypothesis that can serve as a roadmap for future research in this field of generation of new metallic glass. The results and discussions indicate that the proposed approach may be of great interest, for the development of metallic glasses, given the great correlation between the results of this study and the actual obtaining of metallic glasses in recent research.