2024/09/20 by Antoine Cornet, Cornet, Antoine, Jie Shen +43
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Material Dynamics and Properties #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Metallic Glasses and Amorphous Alloys #Theoretical and Computational Physics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.13636
openalex publication_date 2024/09/20 · openalex created_date 2024/10/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Glasses encode the memory of any thermo-mechanical treatment applied to them. This ability is associated to the existence of a myriad of metastable amorphous states which can be probed through different experimental pathways. It is usually assumed that this memory can be erased in the supercooled liquid, and that this process occurs on a time scale controlled by the α-relaxation. We find that this assumption does not apply for hydrostatically compressed glasses. Annealing under pressure a prototypical metallic glass can irreversibly modify its dynamics, thermodynamics and structure, reduce the atomic mobility and lead to structural modifications of the first coordination shells which reduce the thermal stability with respect to a glass annealed in absence of pressure. When heated above their glass transition temperature, these compressed glasses do not convert into the pristine supercooled liquid, implying the existence of an additional process, beyond the α-relaxation, contributing to the equilibrium recovery of the material. These results establish pressure as a powerful tool for engineering non-equilibrium glassy materials with tailored properties, while deepening our understanding of relaxation dynamics in disordered systems under extreme conditions.