Crystallization mechanism and stabilization of supercooled liquid during heating in Zr-Cu metallic glasses

In forming a metallic glass, the molten alloy should be quenched to avoid crystal nucleation during solidification. Understanding of the variation of the glass formability from system to system is therefore possible by considering the kinetics of crystallization. Recently, the authors have found that the crystallization mechanism is different for an amorphous solid and a supercooled liquid, which they attribute to the effects of viscosity on nucleation. Clarifying the crystallization is helpful to understanding the stabilization mechanism of a supercooled liquid. In this paper, they report the correlation between the supercooled liquid region and the crystallization mechanism by examining the glass transition temperature (Tg), the crystallization temperature (Tx), the structure of crystallized products and the morphology for the ternary Zr-Cu alloy systems; they then compare the results with those for the Pd-Ni-P and La-Al-Ni alloys