Investigations of short range order in amorphous Fe-B alloys

Amorphous metallic alloys exhibit a large variety of physical properties that often differ from their crystalline counterparts of the same composition. Currently, metallic glasses exist which, to name only a few examples, are either very non-abrasive, soft magnetic and magneto optical, hard, flexible, or resistant to corrosion. These properties are of great technical importance and there are many applications that are based on amorphous alloys. Since physical properties are related to the structure of a material, a better knowledge of the ‘structure’ of the amorphous state is of great interest. In this work, we present pair distribution functions determined from electron diffraction results for amorphous Fe-B alloys of different compositions. From the pair distribution functions one can obtain information about near neighbor distances, the range of a short range order (SRO) for different compositions, and of similarities to crystalline counterparts. These findings will also be compared to results obtained with the use of high resolution electron microscopy (HREM).