A strategy for rapid analysis of the variations in the reduced distribution function of liquid metals and metallic glasses

Pulsed neutron sources and third-generation synchrotron sources provide sufficiently high flux to acquire high wave momentum diffraction patterns suitable for pair distribution function (PDF) analysis in a matter of minutes to seconds, and even less. This allows for sequential data acquisition of a sample subjected to thermal, mechanical and even magnetic forces. Understanding the dynamics of the material's response to external stimuli will require new ways of analyzing the massive amounts of data collected during these time-resolved studies. The change in the PDF can be quickly evaluated using only the change in the measured intensities from an arbitrary initial state. With appropriate scaling factor, these can provide a quantitative measure of how the pairwise correlations change with external stimuli.