Estimation of the glass-forming ability of metallic glasses with monolayer two-dimensional model

Abstract In present work, the glass-forming ability of Cu-Zr and Cu-Al systems has been estimated by utilizing a monolayer two-dimensional model. The structure of 2D Cu-Zr MGs can be simply characterized by three kinds of Voronoi polygons, i.e. pentagon, hexagon and heptagon, and the structural translational symmetry is broken down by the strong coupling effect between pentagon and heptagon, promoting the formation of MGs. Moreover, the larger bond lengths of Cu-Zr and Zr-Zr pairs are found responsible for the outstanding GFA of Cu-Zr system. The 2D model provides a promising avenue for accurately predicting the GFA of alloys of interest, which is important both in theoretical research and engineering.