Inheritance from glass to liquid: β relaxation depresses the nucleation of crystals

Abstract Both crystallization and relaxation are intrinsic characteristics that derive from the metastable nature of metallic glasses. However, the interactions between the two reactions are not understood fully. In this paper, enthalpy evolution and phase existence diagrams composed of liquid, glass and crystal are established to illustrate the phase transitions upon heating and cooling a metallic glass-forming material. We find that metallic glasses located in different enthalpy levels in the diagrams exhibit quite different resistance to crystallization. The crystal nucleation rate for the fast-cooled glass is smaller compared to the slow-cooled glass, which is verified to be correlated with the larger amount of β relaxation in the fast-cooled sample. These findings provide new evidence for the inheritance between glass and liquid, and suggest that modulating the glassy state is a new route to control the crystallization kinetics of supercooled liquids.