Unveiling Irreversible β-Relaxations in Metallic Glasses via Electrical Resistivity

Dynamic relaxations play an important role in understanding the nature of glass. The conventional methods to explore dynamic relaxations rely on the measurement of mechanical and thermic properties, while new methods that may provide a new perspective to probe dynamic relaxation are desperately required. Here, we show that the β-relaxation of metallic glasses (MGs) can be unveiled by electrical resistivity (ER). Irreversible β-relaxation leads to an increment in electrical resistivity, which can be fitted by the Kohlrausch–Williams–Watts equation well. In contrast, the ER results of the initialized sample only exhibit a negligible change during annealing, which indicates that the reversible β-relaxation change cannot be manifested by ER testing. This work provides the ER measurement as a new means to explore the dynamic relaxation of MGs, which may offer a new insight into the understanding of β-relaxation in glass materials.