Structural relaxation and viscous flow in amorphous ZrAlCu

The ternary metallic glass Zr65Al7.5Cu27.5 offers a wide temperature range between glass transition temperature and crystallization temperature and is therefore well suited for investigation of the glass transition and the state of the super cooled liquid. The non-linear viscosity change caused by structural relaxation has been measured using tensile creep experiments on as quenched samples. The increase of viscosity can be described by bimolecular annihilation kinetics of flow defects. The Arrhenius plot of equilibrium viscosity shows a kink at a temperature which seems to be the glass transition temperature. The activation energies of viscous flow below and above that glass transition temperature differ by nearly a factor two. Different microscopic processes responsible for viscous flow in the two regimes of temperature are therefore conceivable. This view is also encouraged by Dynamic-Mechanical-Analysis on relaxed samples, a method to examine the viscoelastic behaviour of, glassy materials on different time scales and by recent diffusion measurements on a different system.