The work of the group of Amorphous Materials and Physics in the Institue of Physics (IOP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing involves the following areas: solid state amorphization in multilayers; interdiffusion in multilayers; Formation of bulk amorphous, amorphous-based composites and nanocrystalline alloys, and the underlying basics of the thermodynamics and kinetics of metastable phase formation, as well as crystallization behavior and physical properties of amorphous, quasicrystalline and nanocrystalline alloys. The obtained results have been published in a series of papers, which can be found in the publication list of the group.

In recent years, these extensive investigations were transferred to novel multicomponent bulk glass-forming alloy systems, mostly to Zr-based alloys, but also more and more to Pd-, Fe-, Cu, Ni-, Pr-, Nb- and Nd-based systems. The samples were prepared by a variety of different techniques, such as rapid quenching from the melt (melt spinning), slow cooling from the melt (water quenching, copper mould die casting, cooling under microgravity). We also developed some special methods such as quenching under high pressure, addition methods to improve the glass-forming ability of the alloys, yielding Zr-based bulk amorphous alloys that can be obtained with low purity elements under relatively poor vacuum. We will try to transfer this knowledge to other bulk amorphous alloy systems such as the Fe-based alloys. This promises to allow us to specifically link the effective methods directly to the phase formation for other alloys.

The phase transformation, decomposition and nanocrystallization of the amorphous materials under high pressure were systematically investigated for typical Zr-based bulk amorphous alloys as model systems. Various physical properties such as elastic, acoustic, thermodynamic, electric and magnetic properties have been studied especially under low temperature and high pressure. Besides the atomic structure, the electric structure of the bulk amorphous alloys is also one of main topic in this group. These investigations allowed for a systematic characterization and a model-based description of behaviour and physical properties of bulk amorphous alloys.