Coupling of structural preordering and density fluctuation: A unified picture of nucleation in metallic glasses.

Density fluctuations and structural preordering emerge simultaneously during nucleation across disordered metallic systems, spanning pure elements, intermetallic compounds, and glass-forming alloys.

• Why it matters: Early-stage crystallization in disordered materials is not well understood, and prior views—often generalized from hard-sphere colloids—suggested a primary role for structural preordering with density fluctuations as secondary.
• What they did: The authors examined nucleation behavior across multiple disordered metallic systems and tracked the onset of density fluctuations alongside bond-orientational order and free-volume reduction during local atomic rearrangements.
• The result: The observed coupling supports a unified physical framework for nucleation in disordered materials, implying that denser packing, bond-orientational order, and free-volume reduction develop together at the earliest stage.

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