INTRODUCTIONAmorphous metallic alloys, also known as metallic glasses, can be pre pared by several methods and in a fairly wide range of compositions (1, 2). Almost all the composition� that produce amorphous structures stable at room temperature contain i arge fractions of transition metal or rare earth elements, and many of these are ferromagnetic. In particular, the class of alloys containing about 80 at % of the transition metals Fe, Co, and Ni, and about 20 at % of metalloid or glass-former elements such as B, C, P, and Si, are strongly magnetic at room temperature and offer important opportunities for engineering application (3-8). This review is limited almost entirely to these transition metal based alloys obtained by rapid cooling fr om the melt. The preparation and structure of these alloys are briefly summarized, and the magnetic properties of fundamental and engineering importance are reviewed.
COMPOSITIONThe alloys of the class considered here are of the composition T 80M20, where T represents one or more transition metals and M represents one or more metalloid or glass-former elements, usually P, B, C, or Si. Experience indicates that production of the amorphous state is easier (that is, lower cooling rates are sufficient) when both T and M include more than one element. As a consequence, many of the available experimental data concern rather complex compositions. The transition metal content can be varied between about 75 and 85 at %, and the alloys of interest magnetically are those containing mainly Fe, Ni, and Co.The reason for the relative ease of formation of this particular com-423 0084-6600/78/080 1-0423$01.00 Annu. Rev. Mater. Sci. 1978.8:423-457. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by Indiana University -Purdue University Indianapolis -IUPUI on 10/05/12. For personal use only. Quick links to online content Further ANNUAL REVIEWS
424GRAHAM & EGAMI position range is not clear, although many possible reasons have been advanced (9, 10). In the relatively few cases where the phase diagram is known, there is a low-melting eutectic at or near the 80-20 composition. The existence of the eutectic means that the liquid state is stable to relatively low temperatures, and suggests that the amorphous state and the crystalline state are not greatly different in energy. Several reasons have been proposed to explain this. One is a geometrical argument based on the fact that 20 at % of small metalloid atoms are approximately sufficient to occupy the open spaces in a densely packed random array of transitional metal atoms, as determined from a hard-sphere model (11). Another is an electronic band-structure argument based on the reduction in the d-e1ectron band energy by amorphous short-range order (12).An additional requirement for the formation and retention of the amorphous structure is that the kinetics of crystallization must be slow. This presumably results from a high value of the activation energy for nucleation, which reflects the substantial surface energy of the boundary layer between the amorph...