• V.V. Brazhkin
  • O.B. Tsiok
  • A. Tverjanovich
  • T. Usuki
  • C.J. Benmore
  • M. Khomenko
  • A. Sokolov
  • M. Kassem
  • D. Fontanari
  • K. Ohara
  • E. Bychkov
The well-known classification of glass-forming melts into fragile and strong liquids has several notable exceptions, including water, silica, and certain phase-change materials (PCMs). These exceptional fluid systems exhibit a fragile-to-strong transition (FST) upon cooling: a transformation from a high-temperature liquid with fast atomic dynamics, low viscosity, and low flow activation energy, to a viscous supercooled melt with high energy barriers near the glass transition temperature Tg. This behavior is critically important for non-volatile memories, photonic tensor cores, reconfigurable metamaterials, and other devices, that use PCMs, enabling nanosecond-scale crystallization in the fragile regime and long data retention in the strong regime near or below Tg. A significant structural transformation is expected between these two viscosity regimes, along with a semiconductor-metal (SC-M) transition upon heating, driven by high internal pressure and associated density increase. By applying high external pressure to the canonical low-conducting chalcogenide melt As2S3, we observed both the FST and the SC-M transition, occurring simultaneously within the same domain of the P,T−phase space. These findings suggest that the FST is not limited to a few exceptional liquids but is a common phenomenon, at least in systems that exhibit melt metallization within specific regions of their P,T−phase diagrams. © 2026 The Authors.
Original languageEnglish
Article number122001
JournalActa Materialia
Volume308
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Apr 2026

    Research areas

  • First-principles molecular dynamics, Fragile-to-strong transition, High-energy X-ray diffraction, Semiconductor-metal transition, Viscosity under high pressure, Activation energy, Arsenic compounds, Data storage equipment, Glass, Metadata, Molecular dynamics, Phase change materials, Silica, Storage (materials), Tensors, Viscosity, First principles molecular dynamics, High energy X ray, High pressure, Metallisation, Phase Change, X- ray diffractions, Glass transition, Metallizing

ID: 149216144