A facile strategy to produce monatomic tantalum metallic glass

While there has been significant pursuits and interest in single element metallic glass (MG), it has been extremely difficult to obtain. Despite the recent advances in preparing MGs, the massive production of stable monatomic MGs is of great challenge. Here, we show that Ta monatomic MG, presenting identical structural characteristics to those from liquid quenching, can be produced using conventional ion beam deposition on a room temperature substrate. The amorphous structure is retained even after being annealed at 573 K for 2 h, while it fully crystallizes subjected to annealing at 823 K for 5 min, corroborating the previous prediction that Ta MG is stable up to 600 K.