Determination of activation energy spectra of irreversible structural relaxation of metallic glasses using non-isothermal stress relaxation data

A new method for determination of activation energy spectra of irreversible structural relaxation of metallic glasses using the kinetics of torque relaxation under linear heating has been developed. The method is simple, has acceptable accuracy, and lacks some limitations inherent to the known spectrum reconstruction methods. An experiment was carried out to determine the real structural relaxation spectrum of a Go-based metallic glass by this method. The form of this spectrum can indicate that plastic flow under intensive structural relaxation is realized via a set of atomic rearrangements in regions with 'faulty' and 'good' short range order. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.