Direct observation of quadrupolar strain fields surrounding Eshelby inclusions in metallic glasses

However, due to a lack of direct information in reciprocal space, conventional S/TEM cannot characterize the local strain and atomic structure of amorphous materials, which are key to describe the deformation of glasses.

For this work, we applied 4-dimensional STEM to map and directly correlate the local strain and the atomic structure at the nanometer scale in deformed metallic glasses. We observe residual strain fields with quadrupolar symmetry concentrated at dilated Eshelby inclusions. The strain fields percolate in a vortex-like manner building up the shear band.