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It is crucial to avoid crystallization in metallic glasses, which show appealing mechanical properties associated with their amorphous structures. Sohnet al. identify unusual nucleation kinetics in metallic glass nanorods, which exhibits a crystallization temperature minimum at a certain diameter.

The nanoscale manipulation of the shape and composition of metallic glasses is challenging. Here, the authors employ a multitarget carousel oblique angle deposition strategy to synthesize metallic glass nanoarchitectures, and demonstrate applicability to a range of glass-forming alloys.

For metallic glasses composed of three or more elements, optimizing their composition to satisfy a combination of properties is a formidable task. Now, a high-throughput strategy that can simultaneously fabricate thousands of alloy compositions and characterize them for thermoplastic formability through parallel blow forming makes possible the identification of the alloy composition with the highest thermoplastic formability.

How matter deform is a central question in mechanics of materials science. Here, the authors reveal a size-dependent deformation in amorphous metals changing at ~100 nanometer sample size from collective homogeneous flow to interface diffusion realized through individual atomic transport.

Conventional crystal growth models assume crystals grow into a structure-less liquid, even though liquid metals have shown evidence of structural ordering. Here, the authors show crystal growth can be influenced by the presence of thermodynamically unstable local structural order in the liquid.

Crystallising a bulk metallic glass usually results in separate phases. Here, the authors use metallic glass nanorods to show that as the sample size approaches the nucleation scale lengths, the crystallization behavior is dictated by the lack of nuclei and nanorods crystallise into a single phase.

Nanoimprinting is a technique where the surface features of a mould can be transferred onto a replica and is relevant to the production of nanostructured devices. The authors report a method that enables the imprinting of structural features of SrTiO₃ single crystals at the atomic level into a replica made from bulk metallic glass.

In metallic liquids, the fragility is difficult to predict and measure. Here, the authors present the film inflation method, which reveals large fragility variations across Mg–Cu–Y, and introduce the crystallization complexity as additional contribution to glass forming ability.

Upscale fabrication of functionalized microparticles is a pending challenge. Here, Kim et al. exploit the rheology of a thixotropic medium to grind sizeable amounts of raw material into well-defined colloidal dispersions, physically stabilized for further production steps.

The glass forming ability of alloys is found to be strongly correlated with the full-width at half-maximum of the first diffraction peak in the X-ray diffraction pattern, which facilitates the discovery of bulk metallic glass compositions.

Bulk metallic glasses typically display limited ductility. Here, straining a bulk metallic glass during cooling from the supercooled region is shown to enhance bending ductility, attributed to the structure being pulled up the potential energy landscape.