Abstract
A number of properties of amorphous materials including fatigue, fracture and component performance are governed by the magnitude of strain fields around inhomogeneities such as inclusions, voids and cracks. At present, localized strain information is only available from surface probes such as optical or electron microscopy1,2. This is unfortunate because surface and bulk characteristics in general differ. Hence, to a large extent, the assessment of strain distributions relies on untested models. Here we present a universal diffraction method for characterizing bulk stress and strain fields in amorphous materials and demonstrate its efficacy by work on a material of current interest in materials engineering: a bulk metallic glass3-5. The macroscopic response is shown to be less stiff than the atomic next-neighbour bonds because of structural rearrangements at the scale of 4-10 Å. The method is also applicable to composites comprising an amorphous matrix and crystalline inclusions.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 33-36 |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Journal | Nature Materials |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2005 |
Funding
The sample preparation was performed by M. Cheng, N. Pryds, and U. Wolff. For assistance with the experiment we thank T. Buslaps. Discussions with R.V. Martins, M.M. Nielsen and P. Sommer-Larsen are appreciated. This work was supported by the Danish National Research Foundation and the Danish Natural Science Research Council. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addresses to H.F.P.