Size effects: the relation to the percentage of atoms that participate in the deformation of ZrCu metallic glass

Molecular dynamics simulations indicate that with the model diameter gradually decreasing the deformation mode of zrcu metallic glass evolves from highly localized shear band formation to homogeneous deformation with obvious transition in d = 7 - 9 nm. through the statistic of atoms that sustain shear strain larger than 8% in the models with 8% strain along z -direction,we found that the main reason for the uniform deformation that occurs in the smallest size model is that there are 61% atoms involved in the deformation,which significantly decrease the strain assigned to individual atoms,avoiding large atomic rearrangement and making those atoms evenly distributed in the model matrix. © 2014 l. k. gao et al.