Links Between Mechanical Properties and Local Atomic Structures of Cu–Zr Bulk Metallic Glasses

Bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) have drawn much attention due to their interesting mechanical properties such as extraordinary elastic strain limits and a high tensile yield stress [1-6]. For example, their yield strengths can be up to 1 to 5GPa and elastic strain limits up to ~2% [7-10]. However, their use for engineering applications has been challenging since BMGs exhibit localized strain softening leading to failure and brittleness. The underlying atomicscale plastic mechanisms are believed to be mediated by a local microscopic mechanism [11-14]. Such localized processes have been observed during high-strain deformation atomistuc simulations [15-22] inspiring the development of the shear transformation zone (STZ) concept and the effective temperature theory of athermal glass plasticity [23-25].