Preparation of amorphous solids

Melt quenching

Preparation of metallic glasses requires a quite rapid quench. The technique shown in Figure 4C, called splat quenching, can quench a droplet of a molten metal roughly 1,000 °C in one millisecond, producing a thin film of metal that is an amorphous solid. In enormous contrast to this, the silicate glass that forms the rigid ribbed disk of the Hale telescope of the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, Calif., was prepared by cooling (over a comparable temperature drop) during a time interval of eight months. The great difference in the quench rates needed for arriving at the amorphous solid state (the quench rates here differ by a factor of 3 × 10¹⁰) is a dramatic demonstration of the difference in the glass-forming tendency of silicate glasses (very high) and metallic glasses (very low).

The required quench rate for glass formation can vary significantly within a family of related materials that differ from one another in chemical composition. Figure 5 illustrates a representative behaviour for a binary (two-component) system, gold-silicon. Here x specifies the fraction of atoms that are silicon atoms, and Au_{1 - x}Si_x denotes a particular material in this family of materials. (Au is the chemical symbol for gold, Si is the symbol for silicon, and, for example, Au_0.8Si_0.2 denotes a material containing 20 percent silicon atoms and 80 percent gold atoms.) The solid curve labeled T_f shows the composition dependence of the freezing point; above this line the liquid phase is the stable form. There is a deep cusp near the composition x = 0.2. Near this special composition, as at a in the figure, a liquid is much more readily quenched than is a liquid at a distant composition such as b. To reach the glass phase, the liquid must be cooled from above T_f to below T_g without crystallizing. Throughout the temperature interval from T_f down to the glass transition temperature T_g, the liquid is at risk vis-à-vis crystallization. Since this dangerous interval is much longer at b than at a, a faster quench rate is needed for glass formation at b than at a.

Diagrams similar to (though slightly more complicated than) Figure 5 exist for many binary systems. For example, in the oxide system CaO-Al₂O₃, in which the two end-member compositions (x = 0 and x = 1) correspond to pure calcium oxide (CaO) and pure aluminum oxide (Al₂O₃), there is a deep minimum in the T_f-versus-x curve near the middle of the composition range. Although neither calcium oxide nor aluminum oxide readily forms a glass, glasses are easily formed from mixed compositions; for reasons related to this, many oxide glasses have complex chemical compositions.

Vapour condensation techniques

In the gold-silicon system of Figure 5, at compositions far from the cusp, glasses cannot be formed by melt quenching—even by the rapid splat-quench technique of Figure 4. (This is the reason that the T_g curve of Figure 5 spans only compositions near the cusp.) Amorphous solids can still be prepared by dispensing with the liquid phase completely and constructing a thin solid film in atom-by-atom fashion from the gas phase. Figure 4D shows the simplest of these vapour-condensation techniques. A vapour stream, formed within a vacuum chamber by thermal evaporation of a sample of the material to be deposited, impinges on the surface of a cold substrate. The atoms condense on the cold surface and, under a range of conditions (usually a high rate of deposition and a low substrate temperature), an amorphous solid is formed as a thin film. Pure silicon can be prepared as an amorphous solid in this manner. Variations of the method include using an electron beam to vapourize the source or using the plasma-induced decomposition of a molecular species. The latter technique is used to deposit amorphous silicon from gaseous silane (SiH₄). Among the amorphous solids listed in the table, those that normally require vapour-condensation methods for their preparation are silicon (Si), germanium (Ge), water (H₂O), and the elemental metallic glasses iron (Fe), cobalt (Co), and bismuth (Bi).

Other preparation techniques

Numerous other methods exist for preparing amorphous solids, and new methods are continually invented. In melt spinning, a jet of molten metal is propelled against the moving surface of a cold, rotating copper cylinder. A solid film of metallic glass is spun off as a continuous ribbon at a speed that can exceed a kilometre per minute. In laser glazing, a brief intense laser pulse melts a tiny spot, which is swiftly quenched by the surrounding material into a glass. In sol-gel synthesis, small molecules in a liquid solution chemically link up with each other, forming a disordered network. It is possible to take a crystalline solid and convert it into an amorphous solid by bombarding it with high-kinetic-energy ions. Under certain conditions of composition and temperature, interdiffusion (mixing on an atomic scale) between crystalline layers can produce an amorphous phase. Pyrolysis and electrolysis are other methods that can be used.