Evidence of liquid-liquid transition in glass-forming La50Al35Ni15 melt above liquidus temperature.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 26165855.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms8696 and PMC identifier 4510689.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Liquid-liquid transition, a phase transition of one liquid phase to another with the same composition, provides a key opportunity for investigating the relationship between liquid structures and dynamics. Here we report experimental evidences of a liquid-liquid transition in glass-forming La50Al35Ni15 melt above its liquidus temperature by (27)Al nuclear magnetic resonance including the temperature dependence of cage volume fluctuations and atomic diffusion. The observed dependence of the incubation time on the degree of undercooling is consistent with a first-order phase transition. Simulation results indicate that such transition is accompanied by the change of bond-orientational order without noticeable change in density. The temperature dependence of atomic diffusion revealed by simulations is also in agreement with experiments. These observations indicate the need of two-order parameters in describing phase transitions of liquids.