Despite the importance of glass forming ability as a major alloy characteristic, it is poorly understood and its quantification has been experimentally laborious and computationally challenging. Here, we uncover that the glass forming ability of an alloy is represented in its amorphous structure far away from equilibrium, which can be exposed by conventional X-ray diffraction. Specifically, we fabricated roughly 5,700 alloys from 12 alloy systems and characterized the full-width at half-maximum, Δq, of the first diffraction peak in the X-ray diffraction pattern. A strong correlation between high glass forming ability and a large Δq was found. This correlation indicates that a large dispersion of structural units comprising the amorphous structure is the universal indicator for high metallic glass formation. When paired with combinatorial synthesis, the correlation enhances throughput by up to 100 times compared to today’s state-of-the-art combinatorial methods and will facilitate the discovery of bulk metallic glasses.

尽管玻璃形成能力作为主要合金特性很重要，但人们对其知之甚少，并且其量化在实验上很费力且在计算上具有挑战性。在这里，我们发现合金的玻璃形成能力体现在其远离平衡的非晶结构中，这可以通过传统的 X 射线衍射来揭示。具体来说，我们从 12 个合金系统中制造了大约 5,700 种合金，并表征了 X 射线衍射图中第一个衍射峰的半峰全宽 Δ q 。高玻璃形成能力与大 Δ q之间有很强的相关性被找到。这种相关性表明包含无定形结构的结构单元的大分散是高金属玻璃形成的通用指标。当与组合合成相结合时，与当今最先进的组合方法相比，相关性可将通量提高多达 100 倍，并将促进大块金属玻璃的发现。