Vapour condensation techniques
In the gold-silicon system of Figure 5, at compositions far from the cusp, glasses cannot be formed by melt quenching—even by the rapid splat-quench technique ofFigure 4. (This is the reason that the Tg curve of Figure 5 spans only compositions near the cusp.) Amorphous solids can still be prepared by dispensing with the liquid phase completely and constructing a thin solid film in atom-by-atom fashion from the gas phase. Figure 4D shows the simplest of these vapour-condensation techniques