Abstract
The fundamental processes that govern plasticity and determine strength in crystalline materials at small length scales have been studied for over fifty years1,2,3. Recent studies of single-crystal metallic pillars with diameters of a few tens of micrometres or less have clearly demonstrated that the strengths of these pillars increase as their diameters decrease4,5,6,7, leading to attempts to augment existing ideas about pronounced size effects8,9 with new models and simulations10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17. Through in situ nanocompression experiments inside a transmission electron microscope we can directly observe the deformation of these pillar structures and correlate the measured stress values with discrete plastic events. Our experiments show that submicrometre nickel crystals microfabricated into pillar structures contain a high density of initial defects after processing but can be made dislocation free by applying purely mechanical stress. This phenomenon, termed ‘mechanical annealing’, leads to clear evidence of source-limited deformation where atypical hardening occurs through the progressive activation and exhaustion of dislocation sources.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 print issues and online access
$259.00 per year
only $21.58 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Brenner, S. S. Growth and properties of ‘whiskers’. Science 128, 568–575 (1958).
Brenner, S. S. Tensile strength of whiskers. J. Appl. Phys. 27, 1484–1491 (1956).
Herring, C. & Galt, J. K. Elastic and plastic properties of very small metal specimens. Phys. Rev. 85, 1060–1061 (1952).
Uchic, M. D., Dimiduk, D. M., Florando, J. N. & Nix, W. D. Sample dimensions influence strength and crystal plasticity. Science 305, 986–989 (2004).
Dimiduk, D. M., Uchic, M. D. & Parthasarathy, T. A. Size-affected single-slip behavior of pure nickel microcrystals. Acta Mater. 53, 4065–4077 (2005).
Volkert, C. A. & Lilleodden, E. T. Size effects in the deformation of sub-micron Au columns. Phil. Mag. 86, 5567–5579 (2006).
Greer, J. R. & Nix, W. D. Size dependence of mechanical properties of gold at the sub-micron scale. Appl. Phys. A 80, 1625–1629 (2005).
Nix, W. D. Yielding and strain hardening of thin metal films on substrates. Scr. Mater. 39, 545–554 (1998).
Nix, W. D. Mechanical properties of thin films. Metall. Trans. A 20A, 2217–2245 (1989).
Greer, J. R. & Nix, W. D. Nanoscale gold pillars strengthened through dislocation starvation. Phys. Rev. B 73, 6 (2006).
Nix, W. D., Greer, J. R., Feng, G. & Lilleodden, E. T. Deformation at the nanometer and micrometer length scales: Effects of strain gradients and dislocation starvation. Thin Solid Films 515, 3152–3157 (2007).
Parthasarathy, T. A., Rao, S. I., Dimiduk, D. M., Uchic, M. D. & Trinkle, D. R. Contribution to size effect of yield strength from the stochastics of dislocation source lengths in finite samples. Scr. Mater. 56, 313–316 (2007).
Sieradzki, K., Rinaldi, A., Friesen, C. & Peralta, P. Length scales in crystal plasticity. Acta Mater. 54, 4533–4538 (2006).
Guo, Y., Zhuang, Z., Li, X. Y. & Chen, Z. An investigation of the combined size and rate effects on the mechanical responses of FCC metals. Int. J. Solids Struct. 44, 1180–1195 (2007).
Rabkin, E. & Srolovitz, D. J. Onset of plasticity in gold nanopillar compression. Nano Lett. 7, 101–107 (2007).
Rabkin, E., Nam, H. S. & Srolovitz, D. J. Atomistic simulation of the deformation of gold nanopillars. Acta Mater. 55, 2085–2099 (2007).
Tang, H., Schwarz, K. W. & Espinosa, H. D. Dislocation escape-related size effects in single-crystal micropillars under uniaxial compression. Acta Mater. 55, 1607–1616 (2007).
Brenner, S. S. Plastic deformation of copper and silver whiskers. J. Appl. Phys. 28, 1023 (1957).
Uchic, M. D., Dimiduk, D. M., Florando, J. N. & Nix, W. D. Oxide surface films on metal crystals—Response. Science 306, 1134–1135 (2004).
Wei, Q. H. & Wu, X. L. Grain boundary dynamics under mechanical annealing in two-dimensional colloids. Phys. Rev. E 70, 4 (2004).
Kiener, D., Motz, C., Rester, M., Jenko, M. & Dehm, G. FIB damage of Cu and possible consequences for miniaturized mechanical tests. Mater. Sci. Eng. A 459, 262–272 (2007).
Weertman, J. & Weertman, J. R. Elementary Dislocation Theory (Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 1992).
Ziegler, J. F., Biersach, J. P. & Littmark, U. The Stopping and Range of Ions in Solids, Stopping and Range of Ions in Matter Vol. 1 (Pergamon, New York, 1985).
Zhang, H., Schuster, B. E., Wei, Q. & Ramesh, K. T. The design of accurate micro-compression experiments. Scr. Mater. 54, 181–186 (2006).
Koslowski, M. Scaling laws in plastic deformation. Phil. Mag. 87, 1175–1184 (2007).
Minor, A. M. et al. A new view of the onset of plasticity during the nanoindentation of aluminium. Nature Mater. 5, 697–702 (2006).
Acknowledgements
Research performed at the National Center for Electron Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was supported by the Scientific User Facilities Division of the Office of Basic Energy Sciences, US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. This work was also supported by an SBIR Phase II grant DE-FG02-04ER83979 awarded to Hysitron, which does not constitute an endorsement by DOE of the views expressed in this article. Chris Gilde is thanked for his assistance with video editing.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary movie S1: material and sample preparation procedures (MOV 8145 kb)
Supplementary Information
Supplementary movie S2: experimental testing methods (MOV 6347 kb)
Supplementary Information
Supplementary movie S3: mechanical data analysis (MOV 7255 kb)
Supplementary Information
Supplementary movie S4: crystallographic analysis (MOV 9638 kb)
Supplementary Information
Supplementary movie legends, supplementary figures and references (PDF 232 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Shan, Z., Mishra, R., Syed Asif, S. et al. Mechanical annealing and source-limited deformation in submicrometre-diameter Ni crystals. Nature Mater 7, 115–119 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2085
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2085
This article is cited by
-
Rejuvenation as the origin of planar defects in the CrCoNi medium entropy alloy
Nature Communications (2024)
-
Quantitative tests revealing hydrogen-enhanced dislocation motion in α-iron
Nature Materials (2023)
-
Chemical inhomogeneity–induced profuse nanotwinning and phase transformation in AuCu nanowires
Nature Communications (2023)
-
On the origin of plasticity-induced microstructure change under sliding contacts
Friction (2023)
-
Impact of Atomic Void Clusters on the Tensile Behavior and its Features of Silicon Carbide Polycrystal through Molecular Dynamics Analysis
Silicon (2023)