Icosahedral binary clusters of glass-forming Lennard–Jones binary alloy

It is widely believed that the local icosahedral structure is related to the formation of bulk metallic glasses (BMGs). Specifically the existence of 13-atom icosahedral cluster in undercooled liquid is imagined to play a key role to initiate the glass formation as the seed of amorphous structure or to block the nucleation of regular crystal as the impurity. The existence of 13-atom icosahedral clusters in one-component liquids was predicted more than half a century ago by Frank from his total energy calculation for isolated clusters. In BMG alloys, however, the situation is less clear. In this report, we present the lowest-energy structures of 13-atom Lennard–Jones binary cluster calculated from the modified space-fixed genetic algorithm. We study, in particular, the artificial Lennard–Jones potential designed by Kob and Andersen [W. Kob, H.C. Andersen, Phys. Rev. E 51 (1995) 4626] that is known to form BMG. Curiously, the lowest-energy structures of 13-atom cluster are non-icosahedral for almost all compositions. Our result suggests that the existence of the icosahedral cluster is not a necessary condition but only a sufficient condition for glass formation.