1. Amorphous state

1.1 Structure

Until the discovery of metallic glass , amorphous materials were essentially glasses obtained from silicate mixtures melted and then cooled relatively slowly, by a few degrees per second. During cooling, the atoms organize themselves at short distances, forming quasi-equivalent polyhedra of atoms, which retain the disordered distribution close to that which they had in the liquid state.

In metals and organized alloys, the atoms are distributed in positions in space that give rise to a periodic crystal lattice of patterns,...