Measuring strain distributions in amorphous materials

A number of properties of amorphous materials including fatigue, fracture and component performance are governed by the magnitude of strain fields around inhomogeneities such as inclusions, voids and cracks. At present, localized strain information is only available from surface probes such as optical or electron microscopy1,2.

This is unfortunate because surface and bulk characteristics in general differ. Hence, to a large extent, the assessment of strain distributions relies on untested models. Here we present a universal diffraction method for characterizing bulk stress and strain fields in amorphous materials and demonstrate its efficacy by work on a material of current interest in materials engineering: a bulk metallic glass3,4,5.

The macroscopic response is shown to be less stiff than the atomic next-neighbour bonds because of structural rearrangements at the scale of 4–10 Å. The method is also applicable to composites comprising an amorphous matrix and crystalline inclusions.