• 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.
Язык оригиналаАнглийский
Номер статьи122001
ЖурналActa Materialia
Том308
DOI
СостояниеОпубликовано - 15 апр 2026

ID: 149216144