TEM specimen preparation for Al-based amorphous alloys

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is usually used to identify the amorphicity. However, some artifacts may be introduced due to improper TEM foil preparation. In this paper, three Al-rich metallic glasses with and without a glass transition were selected for characterizing the effect of the electropolishing condition on the as-quenched structure during TEM specimen preparation. It is shown that the occurrence of the modulated bright-dark structure under TEM observation is closely sensitive to the electropolishing condition, which suggests us being careful about the possible artifacts induced by specimen preparation when examining amorphous alloys under TEM.