Origin of abnormal glass transition behavior in metallic glasses

• Two glass-transition-like appearance in supercooled liquid region was investigated.
• The origin of this behavior was also investigated by DSC, XRD, and HRTEM.
• It is found that the abnormal behavior is attributed to amorphous transition.

In this paper, the phenomenon of two glass-transition-like appearance in the supercooled liquid region of metallic glasses was investigated. It is confirmed that this abnormal behavior is attributed to the transition process of an amorphous state from higher energy to lower energy. The amorphous state with higher energy comes from the uneven distribution of compositions in glasses, which is mainly caused by the component with significant differences in atomic size and nonnegative values of enthalpy of mixing. The results were verified by high resolution transmission electron microscopy and energy-dispersive spectrometry.