EXAFS and diffraction studies of athermal agitation effects on the local structure of amorphous Ni₇₅Si₈B₁₇ alloy

EXAFS spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction studies were carried out to reveal the effects of athermal and thermal agitation on the local atomic structure in a splat-cooled amorphous Ni₇₅Si₈B₁₇ alloy. The agitation was added by either milling or shock-loading. It was found that the as-splat-cooled amorphous alloy is composed of such tetrahedron molecules as having distorted NiSi bond distance and that such structure was changed, by the athermal agitation, into the activated one which is composed of the molecules with single bond metallic distances and has a little larger intermolecular spacings.