The thermal history effect on shear band initiation in metallic glass

Abstract

The effect of thermal history on shear band initiation in metallic glass is investigated with spherical nanoindentation. Our results clearly show that the indentation size effect on the metallic-glass hardness varies systematically with the thermal history, which is in excellent agreement with the softening-induced shear-band initiation model we recently developed. On a fundamental level, the outcome of our research establishes a correlation between the shear modulus and the critical length scale for initiating an autocatalytic shear-band growth in metallic glasses.