Evident Glass Relaxation at Room Temperature Manifested by Size Effect

The glass relaxation under ambient conditions is essential for understanding the nature of glass state, and has stimulated scientific and general public interests for centuries. However, owing to the extremely slow dynamics, experimental characterization of glass relaxation at ambient temperatures is quite challenging, and often takes several years. Here we report evident relaxation of metallic glasses at room temperature within the observation time of less one month when the feature size of glasses is reduced. The relaxation dynamics shows a size dependence similar to that on temperature, and an equivalence between size and temperature on affecting the relaxation dynamics is established. We also showed that a MG film with a feature size of ~ 10 nm at room temperature has a fast relaxation dynamics equivalent to that of a bulk MG near the glass transition temperature, indicating that the liquid-like behavior in glasses can be induced by size reduction.