Phase patterning of metallic glasses through superfast quenching of ion irradiation-induced thermal spikes.

Amorphous metallic glasses (MGs) convert to crystalline solids upon annealing at a high temperature. Such a phase change, however, does not occur with the local melting caused by damage cascades introduced by ion irradiation, although the resulting thermal spikes can reach temperatures > 1000 K. This is because the quenching rate of the local melting zone is several orders of magnitude higher than the critical cooling rate for MG formation. Thus the amorphous structure is sustained. This mechanism increases the highest temperature at which irradiated MG sustains amorphous phase. More interestingly, if an irradiated MG is pre-annealed to form a polycrystalline structure, ion irradiation can locally convert this crystalline phase to an amorphous phase if the grains are nanometers in size and comparable to the damage cascade volume size. Combining pre-annealing and site selective ion irradiation, patterned crystalline-amorphous heterogeneous structures have been fabricated. This finding opens new doors for various applications.

Tarvajeh: Word Association Norms for Persian Words.

In recent years, word associations have played a key role in cognitive research. The goal of this study is to propose a new system called Tarvajeh to construct and analyze the association norms found in the Persian language. In this paper, we present Tarvajeh, a data set for Persian words in a continuous word association task. For data collection, cue words have been categorized into groups and then, 30 of them were presented to each participant in two phases. Afterward, the participants were asked to write the first three words that are related to the initial cue words. After data collection, Tarvajeh included 240 frequent Persian cues and more than 20,000 different responses. Furthermore, we also propose a method that allows participants to compare their responses as well as their subconscious mind with those of their peers using a unique graph that is tailored to their responses and is displayed to them. Finally, we compared our data with those of associated words in other languages. The comparison reveals that, for some cues, most associated words are the same, while for others, the most frequent responses are unique within each data set. In addition, some gender-related differences were observed with male participants spending more time on their responses than female participants.