Cooling rate dependence and local structure in aluminum monatomic metallic glass

The local atomic structure in aluminium monatomic metallic glass is studied using molecular dynamics simulations combined with the embedded atom method (EAM). We have used a variety of analytical methods to characterise the atomic configurations of our system: the Pair Distribution Function (PDF), the Common Neighbour Analysis (CNA) and the Voronoi Tessellation Analysis. CNA was used to investigate the order change from liquid to amorphous phases, recognising that the amount of icosahedral clusters increases with the decrease of temperature. The Voronoi analysis revealed that the icosahedral-like polyhedral are the predominant ones. It has been observed that the PDF function shows a splitting in the second peak, which cannot be attributed to the only ideal icosahedral polyhedron <0, 0, 12, 0>, but also to the formation of other Voronoi polyhedra <0, 1, 10, 2>. Further, the PDFs were then integrated giving the cumulative coordination number in order to compute the fractal dimension (d(f)).