Molecular dynamics simulation of fabrication of Cu mono-component metallic glass by physical vapor deposition on Zr substrate

In this work, the single-component Cu metallic glass was fabricated by the physical vapor deposition on the Zr (0001) crystal substrate at 100 K using the classical molecular dynamic simulation. The same deposition process was performed on the Cu (1 0 0) and Ni (1 0 0) crystal substrate for comparison, only the Cu crystal deposited layer with the fcc structure can be obtained. When depositing the Cu atoms on the Zr substrate at 300 K, the crystal structure was formed, which indicates that except the suitable substrate, low temperature is also a key factor for the amorphous structure formation. The Cu liquid quenching from 2000 K to 100 K were also simulated with the cooling rate 1012 K/s to form the Cu glass film in this work. The Cu metallic glass from the two different processes (physical vapor deposition and rapid thermal quenching from liquid) revealed the same radial distribution function and X-ray diffraction pattern, but the different microstructure from the coordination number and Voronoi tessellation analysis.