The Wei Hua WANG’s group，Institute of Physic, Chinese Academy of Sciences recently investigated the structure feature of a model CuZr metallic glass during deformation by molecular dynamics simulations. Spatially heterogeneous irreversible rearrangement is observed in terms of non-affine displacement. They find that the regions with smaller non-affine displacement have more Voronoi pentagons, while in those with larger non-affine displacement other types of faces are more populated. We use the degree of local five-fold symmetry as the structural indicator to predict the plastic deformation of the local structures and find that the plastic events prefer to be initiated in the regions with less degree of local five-fold symmetry and propagate toward the region with more degree of local five-fold symmetry. The results have implications for understand the long standing issues of plastic mechanism of amorphous materials. The paper is published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 135503(2011) 

Fig.1. The atomistic configurations of the non-affine displacement D2illustrated by colors at the strain of 5% with time interval of  Δ=10 ps (a) and 40 ps (b).

Fig.2. The correlation between the structures having more degree of local five-fold symmetry and the irreversible rearrangement during deformation. at the strain of (a) 5% and (b) 10%.