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Absence of 2.5 power law for fractal packing in metallic glasses
Jianrui Feng1,2, Pengwan Chen1, Mo Li2
1State Key Laboratory of Explosion Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
Atomic packing is still a mystery for topologically disordered amorphous solids owing primarily to the absence of Bragg diffraction in this class of materials. Among many hypotheses, fractal packing is suggested based on a scaling relation with '2.5 power law' found in multicomponent metallic glasses. Here we examine the atomic packing critically in a pure Tantalum metallic glass under hydrostatic pressure. Without complications of chemical compositions as in the multicomponent systems, the genuine amorphous structure along in the single component metallic glass exhibits a cubic scaling exponent that indicates absence of the 2.5 power law. However, fractal-like short- and medium-range icosahedral cluster packing is observed; but these substructures do not contribute to the fractal dimension through the power law scaling.
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