Stress-induced amorphization at moving crack tips in NiTi

In situ fracture studies have been carried out on thin films of the NiTi intermetallic compound under plane stress, tensile loading conditions in the high-voltage electron microscope. Local stress-induced amorphization of regions directly in front of moving crack tips has been observed. The upper cutoff temperature, T_C-A^max, for the stress-induced crystalline-to-amorphous transformation was found to be 600 K, identical to that for heavy ion-induced amorphization of NiTi and for ion-beam mixing-induced amorphization of Ni and Ti multilayer specimens. 600 K is also both the lower cutoff temperature, T_A-C^min, for radiation-induced crystallization of initially-unrelaxed amorphous NiTi and the lowest isothermal annealing temperature, T_X^min, at which stress-induced amorphous NiTi crystallizes. Since T_X^min should be T_K, the ideal glass transition temperature, the discovery that T_C-A^max=T_A-C^min=T_X ^min=T_K implies that disorder-driven crystalline-to-amorphous transformations result in the formation of the ideal glass, i.e., the glassy state that has the same entropy as that of the defect-free crystal. As the glassy state with the lowest free energy, its formation can be understood as the most energetically-favored, kinetically-constrained response of crystalline alloys driven far from equilibrium.