Free-volume-induced enhancement of plasticity in a monolithic bulk metallic glass at room temperature

The limited plasticity of bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) is commonly circumvented by introducing micrometer- or nanometer-sized heterogeneities (crystallites and/or phase separation) into the BMGs. In this work, we report the improvement of plasticity in a ternary monolithic BMG caused by a large amount of randomly distributed free volume induced during solidification using a high cooling rate. This indicates that introducing large amounts of free volume into BMGs might be another promising way of improving the plasticity of these materials.