This grant explores non-crystalline materials using neutron and X-ray diffraction to characterize the atomic structure. The emphasis is on binary and quasi-binary metallic liquids and related amorphous metallic alloys prepared by mechanical alloying. Amorphization is investigated in mechanically alloyed intermetallic alloys to find a correlation between the degree of chemical order in solid and liquid alloys and the process of glass formation by rapid quenching and mechanical alloying. Topological and chemical short range order is determined from diffraction patterns using conventional, synchrotron, and pulsed neutron sources. The structure of inorganic glasses produced from the liquid state and sol-gel processing is also examined.
