Thermodynamic scaling of glassy dynamics and dynamic heterogeneities in metallic glass-forming liquid

YC Hu and BS Shang and PF Guan and Y Yang and HY Bai and WH Wang, JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL PHYSICS, 145, 104503 (2016).

DOI: 10.1063/1.4962324

A ternary metallic glass-forming liquid is found to be not strongly correlating thermodynamically, but its average dynamics, dynamic heterogeneities including the high order dynamic correlation length, and static structure are still well described by thermodynamic scaling with the same scaling exponent gamma. This may indicate that the metallic liquid could be treated as a single-parameter liquid. As an intrinsic material constant stemming from the fundamental interatomic interactions, gamma is theoretically predicted from the thermodynamic fluctuations of the potential energy and the virial. Although gamma is conventionally understood merely from the repulsive part of the inter- particle potentials, the strong correlation between gamma and the Gruneisen parameter up to the accuracy of the Dulong-Petit approximation demonstrates the important roles of anharmonicity and attractive force of the interatomic potential in governing glass transition of metallic glassformers. These findings may shed light on how to understand metallic glass formation from the fundamental interatomic interactions. Published by AIP Publishing.

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