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Abstract The relaxation of amorphous materials, i.e., aging, would largely endanger their performances in service. Here we report a mechanical relaxation-to-rejuvenation transition of a Zr35Ti30Be27.5Cu7.5 bulk metallic glass (BMG) in elastostatic compression at ambient temperature, thus provide an accessible way to tailor the mechanical properties of amorphous materials. To unravel the structural evolution underlying the observed transition, atomistic simulations parallel with the experimental tests on a typical model glass system Zr60Cu40 were performed, which successfully reproduced and thus upheld the experimentally observed mechanical relaxation-to-rejuvenation transition. The variations of coordination number and atomic volume during the transition are evaluated to indicate a de-mixing tendency of the constituent atoms in the rejuvenation stage. This de-mixing tendency largely explains the difference between mechanical rejuvenation and thermal rejuvenation and reveals a competitive relationship between activation enthalpy and activation entropy in the stress-driven temperature-assisted atomic dynamics of BMG, such as diffusion and plastic deformation etc.

Two new microstrip triple-mode resonators loaded with T-shaped open stubs using axially and centrally symmetric spiral structures, respectively, are presented. Spiraled for circuit size reduction, these two half-wavelength resonators can both generate three resonant modes over a wide frequency band by loading two T-stubs with different lengths. Due to the structural symmetry, they can be analyzed by odd- and even-mode method. To validate the design concept, two compact bandpass filters (BPFs) using these two novel resonators with center frequencies of 1.76 GHz and 2.44 GHz for the GSM1800 and WLAN/Zigbee applications, respectively, have been designed, fabricated and tested. The center frequencies and bandwidths can be tunable through the analysis of resonant frequency responses, fractional bandwidths and external quality factor versus the resonator parameters. The final measured results have achieved good consistence with the simulations of these two BPFs.