Credit: Image courtesy of Hillary Smith and Brent Fultz, California Institute of Technology
What happens when a metallic glass is melted? Inelastic neutron scattering was used to answer this age-old question. The figure shows spectra upon heating a metallic glass into a liquid at its glass transition temperature (amorphous on the left) and after it crystallizes (right) at higher temperatures. The energy transferred from neutrons to the sample is the vertical axis, and the momentum transferred is the horizontal axis. Vibrational spectra extracted from the scattering data showed little difference between the amorphous and crystalline states.