Tunneling States in Metallic Glasses: A Structural Model

Abstract
We analyze the metastable states for individual atoms within a computer-generated structural model of a metallic glass, and discover that their probability of occurrence is a strong function of the degree of relaxation of the model. We propose that the relaxation process simulates closely the annealing of metallic glasses below the glass transition temperature, so that the annealing process should reduce the magnitudes of the various low-temperature anomalies seen in these materials.