Heavy rare earth based bulk metallic glasses with high thermal stability

We report a family of ternary Gd–Al–Co alloys based on the heavy gadolinium rare earth element can be readily cast into fully glassy rod by a conventional casting method. It is found that the bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) have much high thermal stability (i.e. high glass transition temperature and crystallization temperature) and high moduli compared with those of other known rare-earth based BMGs. It is confirmed that, in addition to the strong chemical interaction among the components, the high bulk modulus of the base component in the BMGs is dominantly responsible for the high thermal stability. The thermal stability is correlated with the bulk modulus of the base element in the rare earth based BMGs.