A team of materials scientists headed by Prof Scott Mao from the University of Pittsburgh has managed to make metallic glasses from pure, monoatomic metals.

Metallic glasses are unique in that their structure is not crystalline as it is in most metals, but rather is disordered, with the atoms randomly arranged.

They are sought for various commercial applications because they are very strong and are easily processed.

Prof Mao’s method of creating metallic glass involved developing and implementing a novel technique – a cooling nano-device under in-situ transmission electron microscope.

This technique enabled Prof Mao and his colleagues to achieve an unprecedentedly high cooling rate that allowed for the transformation of liquefied elemental metals tantalum (Ta) and vanadium (V) into glass.

“This is a fundamental issue explored by people in this field for a long time, but nobody could solve the problem,” said Prof Mao, who is the senior author of a paper describing the new technique in the journal Nature.

“People believed that it could be done, and now we’re able to show that it is possible.”

_____

Li Zhong et al. 2014. Formation of monatomic metallic glasses through ultrafast liquid quenching. Nature 512, 177–180; doi: 10.1038/nature13617