THE STRUCTURAL RELAXATION OF CR65FE35 AMORPHOUS POWDER OBTAINED BY MECHANICAL MILLING

In previous work we have proposed that structurally disordered Cr65Fe3 5 powder prepared by mechanical milling is an extremely defective syst em. The powder is composed of random densely packed and random loosely packed atomic configurations. In this work a subsequent annealing of this powder has been performed and the structural relaxation has been followed by X-ray diffraction, Mossbauer spectroscopy and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The results indicate that during annealin g the random loosely packed atomic configurations relax to the random densely packed ones. For DSC measurements at low heating rate the rela xation covers a large temperature range, while at higher heating rate the relaxation shifts to higher temperatures and exhibits an exothermi c peak just below the crystallization temperature.