Amorphization of Intermetallic Compounds by Energetic Heavy Ion Irradiation

Abstract

Amorphous alloys are expected to be useful for various applications because they have superior mechanical properties such as strength, hardness and corrosion resistance. So far, the only method for production of amorphous metals is to quench from the liquid state. When materials are exposed to high-energy ions, the lattice structures of the materials tend to be metastable or non-thermally equilibrium, and in some cases, they lose the crystallinity, resulting in amorphization. However, the alloy types and irradiation conditions that cause amorphization by irradiation have never been well clarified yet. In order to study the amorphization by particles irradiation as one of the material processes such as strength control, we have studied the structural changes and the accompanying hardness changes of the bulk crystalline alloys due to various irradiation conditions. In this paper, we discuss the correlation between amorphization and hardness change when heavy ion irradiation is applied to several intermetallic compounds.