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Nature Materials 5, 253 - 254 (2006)
doi:10.1038/nmat1621

Crystal deformation: Colloid model for atoms

Subra Suresh1

  1. Subra Suresh is at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139-4307, USA. e-mail: ssuresh@mit.edu


Pushing a sewing needle into a colloidal crystal may seem a crude experiment. On the contrary, combined with laser diffraction microscopy and confocal microscopy, it provides a valuable analogy to nanoindentation and promises a deeper understanding of the mechanical response of crystalline materials.

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