The glass transition and plastic deformation mechanism of bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) has been one of hot research topics in the material science and condensed matter physics.
　  The research group of Prof W.H. Wang，Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has long been engaging the research of elastic properties of BMGs. A plentiful of data and results involving in acoustic velocities, elastic constants and their response to aging, relaxation, applied press, pressure and temperature of the metallic glasses have been compiled.  The thermodynamic and kinetic parameters, stability, mechanical and physical properties of various available metallic glasses especially BMGs have also been collected.
　  A survey based on the plentiful experimental data reveals that the linear elastic constants have striking systematic correlations with the microstructural features, glass transition temperature, melting temperature, relaxation behaviour, Boson peak, strength, hardness, plastic yielding of the glass, and even rheological properties of the glass forming liquids.  The elastic constants of BMGs also show a correlation with a weighted average of the elastic constants of the constituent elements. We show that the elastic moduli correlations can assist in selecting alloying components with suitable elastic moduli for controlling the elastic properties and glass-forming ability of the metallic glasses, and thus the results would enable the design, control and tuning of the formation and properties of metallic glasses.
　  They demonstrate that the glass transition, the primary and secondary relaxations, plastic deformation and yield can be attributed to the free volume increase induced flow, and the flow can be modeled as the activated hopping between the inherent states in the potential energy landscape.  An extended elastic model to understand flow in metallic glass and glass-forming supercooled liquid is proposed, and the model presents a simple and quantitative mathematic expression for flow activation energy of various glasses. The elastic perspectives, which consider all metallic glasses exhibit universal behavior based on a small number of readily measurable parameters of elastic moduli, are presented for understanding the nature and diverse properties of the metallic glasses.
　  Above work is invited to be published as a review paper titled ”The elastic properties, elastic models and elastic perspectives of metallic glasses” in top review journal in materials science field (Prog Mater. Sci. see http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079642511000934)
　  The research is jointly funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, MOST 973 of China and CAS.

Figure caption:　 The illustration of possible diagram for flow in metallic glass. （Image by W.H. Wang et al.）