Metallic Glasses: Investigation of the Electronic Structure and Its Relationship to Physical Properties

During the past decade, materials scientists and solid state physicists have devoted considerable research activity to amorphous materials such as magnetic glasses, amorphous semiconductors and amorphous metallic alloys. This is due to a combination of a desire for a re-examination of some fundamental concepts of solids as well as the possibility for a variety of technological applications. Our research effort has focused principally on the class of amorphous materials known as amorphous metallic alloys or metallic glasses materials which possess all the properties normally associated with metals but are not spatially periodic. For the most part, we have studied metallic glass systems with the general form TM100-xGx, where TM is a transition metal or combination of transition metals such as Ni, Pd, Pt, Fe or Co and G is a high valence metalloid or combination of metalloids such as B, Nb, Si or P.