Quantitative understanding of the fracture toughness of metallic glasses, including the associated ductile-to-brittle transitions, is not yet available. Here we use a simple model of plastic deformation in glasses, coupled to an advanced Eulerian level set formulation for solving complex free boundary problems, to calculate the fracture toughness of metallic glasses as a function of the degree of structural relaxation corresponding to different annealing times near the glass temperature. Our main result indicates the existence of an elasto-plastic crack tip instability for sufficiently relaxed glasses, resulting in a marked drop in the toughness, which we interpret as a ductile-to-brittle transition similar to experimental observations.
Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci cond-mat.dis-nn physics.comp-ph