Ferroic Glasses: Magnetic, Polar and Strain Glass

© 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim When a liquid phase is cooled below its freezing temperature, it usually transforms to a crystalline solid where the disorder–order transition is driven by the thermodynamic requirement of reducing the entropy in the corresponding thermodynamic potential of the system. However, some liquids do not crystallize because of the complex nature of the inter-atomic interactions as, for example, in multi-atom metallic materials when heterogeneous nucleation can be reduced during cooling from the liquid to the solid phase, which can be infl uenced by strain rates modifying the viscosity [1, 2]. The resulting non-crystalline materials show a complex potential-energy landscape and the elastic properties of a cluster of atoms can vary signifi cantly in space. Such local properties of metallic glasses are still subject of intensive ongoing research [3].