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Updated: Jul 6, 2025

Methods of Ex Situ and In Situ Investigations of Structural Transformations: The Case of Crystallization of Metallic Glasses
Published on: June 7, 2018
Direct measurement of the structural change associated with amorphous solidification using static scattering of
Charlotte F Petersen1,2, Peter Harrowell1
1School of Chemistry, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia.
Abstract:
In this paper, we demonstrate that the weak temperature dependence of the structure factor of supercooled liquids, a defining feature of the glass transition, is a consequence of the averaging of the scattering intensity due to angular averaging. We show that the speckle at individual wavevectors, calculated from a simulated glass former, exhibits a Debye-Waller factor with a sufficiently large temperature dependence to represent a structural order parameter capable of distinguishing liquid from glass. We also extract from the speckle intensities a quantity proportional to the variance of the local restraint, i.e., a direct experimental measure of the amplitude of structural heterogeneity.
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