Soohyun Im² Jared Johnson² Gabriel Calderon Ortiz² Menglin Zhu² Pengyang Zhao² Geun Hee Yoo¹ Eun Soo Park¹ Yunzhi Wang² Jinwoo Hwang²

2, Materials Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States
1, Seoul National University, Seoul, , Korea (the Republic of)

We determine the nano-to-mesoscale structural heterogeneity in metallic glasses (MGs) using 4- dimensional (4D) nanodiffraction in scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM). Structural heterogeneity in MGs has been suggested by both experiments and simulations previously. The heterogeneity must involve local structural ordering at the nanoscale, commonly known as medium range order (MRO), some of which has been studied using small electron probes in the past. However, the statistically reliable information on how such MRO constitutes the heterogeneity has remained difficult to determine. Our new approach to determine the MRO and structural heterogeneity involves 4D-STEM, which uses a new-generation pixelated fast STEM detector that allows for the continuous collection of the diffraction patterns from a large area of the MG sample. Using angular correlation and intensity variance analyses, the diffraction patterns can then be converted to real space maps of the local ordering, which we use to precisely determine the type, size, distribution, and volume fraction of MRO. We will present two cases of how the heterogeneity affects the important properties of MGs, one is the glass stability in Ti-based MGs, and the other is the ductility of Zr-based MGs. To connect the structural heterogeneity to ductility, we use a new mesoscale simulation that incorporates the experimentally determined heterogeneity, which can simulate realistic shear band formation and overall deformation that match the spatial and temporal scales of the deformation of real MGs.