Title: Increased stability of CuZrAl metallic glasses prepared by physical vapor deposition,
Abstract: We carried out molecular dynamics simulations (MD) using realistic empirical
potentials for the vapor deposition (VD) of CuZrAl glasses. VD glasses have
higher densities and lower potential and inherent structure energies than the
melt-quenched glasses for the same alloys. The optimal substrate temperature
for the deposition process is 0.625$\times T_\mathrm{g}$. In VD metallic
glasses (MGs), the total number of icosahedral like clusters is higher than in
the melt-quenched MGs. Surprisingly, the VD glasses have a lower degree of
chemical mixing than the melt-quenched glasses. The reason for it is that the
melt-quenched MGs can be viewed as frozen liquids, which means that their
chemical order is the same as in the liquid state. In contrast, during the
formation of the VD MGs, the absence of the liquid state results in the
creation of a different chemical order with more Zr-Zr homonuclear bonds
compared with the melt-quenched MGs. In order to obtain MGs from melt-quench
technique with similarly low energies as in the VD process, the cooling rate
during quenching would have to be many orders of magnitude lower than currently
accessible to MD simulations. The method proposed in this manuscript is a more
efficient way to create MGs by using MD simulations.