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It has long been conjectured that any metallic liquid can be vitrified into a glassy state provided that the cooling rate is sufficiently high^,,,. Experimentally, however, vitrification of single-element metallic liquids is notoriously difficult. True laboratory demonstration of the formation of monatomic metallic glass has been lacking. Here we report an experimental approach to the vitrification of monatomic metallic liquids by achieving an unprecedentedly high liquid-quenching rate of 10¹⁴ K s⁻¹. Under such a high cooling rate, melts of pure refractory body-centred cubic (bcc) metals, such as liquid tantalum and vanadium, are successfully vitrified to form metallic glasses suitable for property interrogations. Combining in situ transmission electron microscopy observation and atoms-to-continuum modelling, we investigated the formation condition and thermal stability of the monatomic metallic glasses as obtained. The …