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Since the 1960s, metallic glasses (MGs) have attracted tremendous re-search interest in materials science and engineering, given their unique cornbination of mechanical properties. How-ever, the industrial applications of MGs have been hindered due to their lack of ductility in bulk form at room temperature. In contrast, it was observed that MGs could exhibit excellent plasticity at the small size scale. In this article, we summarize the related experimental findings having been reported so far together with the possible origins of such a size effect in MGs. The enhanced plasticity of MGs in small volumes, together with their high mechanical strengths and remarkable thermoplastic formability, strongly implies that MGs are the promising materials for fabricating the next generation of micro- and nano-devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the shear-banding behavior in bulk metallic-glasses (BMGs) is studied using a focused ion beam (FIB)-based nanoindentation method, which involves cylindrical nanoindentation of a FIB-milled BMG microlamella and is capable of revealing the subsurface shear-band patterns down to the submicron scale. The results of the current study on a Zr-based BMG clearly show that short shear bands, with the lengths of a few hundred nanometers, could be severely kinked before growing into a longer one, which implies that structural heterogeneity plays an important role in the microplasticity of BMGs. Furthermore, through the three-dimensional finite-element simulation combined with the theoretical calculation based on the Mohr-Coulomb law, it is found that the yield strengths exhibit a large scatter as a consequence of the structural heterogeneity when microplasticity occurs in the Zr-based BMG, which is consistent with our recent findings obtained from the microcompression experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intense debates have been prompted concerning whether homogeneous deformation can be achieved in bulk metallic glasses at room temperature through the suppression of shear bands at the submicron scale. In this short communication, we demonstrate that multiple shear banding can be successfully attained via a proper modification of the microsample geometry, resulting in the appearance of a homogeneous deformation mode at the submicron scale. However, the apparent deformation homogeneity in our microcompression experiment is a manifestation of the sample geometry effect on the propagation rather than nucleation of shear bands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]