Electronic theory of metallic glass formation

Abstract

The structure and stability of transition-metal glasses are discussed on a quantum mechanical basis. Our approach requires two steps:

1.	the determination of the concentration dependence of electronic properties such as internal energy from a model tight-binding Hamiltonian;
2.	the calculation therefrom of the structure and of the thermodynamic properties using a thermodynamic variational technique based on the Gibbs-Bogoljubov inequality and the hard-sphere Yukawa model as a reference system.

The metallic glass is treated thermodynamically as an undercooled liquid. We show that chemical short-range order is essential to explain both the structural properties and the stability of transition-metal amorphous alloys. Our results are applied to a discussion of solid-state amorphization reactions. More particularly, our calculated thermodynamic data are used to predict the composition range in which a single amorphous phase is expected.