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Metals and alloys

Amorphization-mediated plasticity

Nature Materials volume 22, pages 1057–1058 (2023)Cite this article

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Amorphization can be an additional mechanism to assist plastic deformation in crystalline materials, providing a strategy to improve the load-bearing ability of brittle materials.

Most materials can undergo permanent shape change when subjected to external loading, a property often termed as plasticity. The ability to mediate plastic deformation without fracture determines, to a large extent, the application of technological materials. Macroscopic plasticity can be mediated by various microscopic mechanisms, including dislocation slip or climb, twinning and martensitic phase transformations. In some extreme cases, such as severe plastic deformation, materials can also experience localized amorphization (crystalline-to-amorphous phase transition), which causes materials to suddenly lose their load-bearing ability and eventually leads to fracture1. Therefore, amorphization is usually considered undesirable and should be avoided. Now, writing in Nature Materials2, Xuanxin Hu and colleagues report that, in some intermetallic systems, directional amorphization can also drive plasticity with sustained work-hardening ability, suggesting that the susceptibility of deformation-induced amorphization may be a design parameter in the search for materials with enhanced mechanical properties.

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Fig. 1: Brittle-to-ductile amorphous shear bands in the binary Al–Sm system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China

    Shiteng Zhao

  2. Tianmushan Laboratory, Hangzhou, China

    Shiteng Zhao

  3. State Key Laboratory of Nonlinear Mechanics, Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Xiaolei Wu

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  1. Shiteng Zhao
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  2. Xiaolei Wu
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Correspondence to Shiteng Zhao or Xiaolei Wu.

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Zhao, S., Wu, X. Amorphization-mediated plasticity. Nat. Mater. 22, 1057–1058 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-023-01638-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-023-01638-6

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