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Published February 2010 | public
Journal Article

Fabrication, structure and mechanical properties of indium nanopillars

Abstract

Solid and hollow cylindrical indium pillars with nanoscale diameters were prepared using electron beam lithography followed by the electroplating fabrication method. The microstructure of the solid-core indium pillars was characterized by scanning micro-X-ray diffraction, which shows that the indium pillars were annealed at room temperature with very few dislocations remaining in the samples. The mechanical properties of the solid pillars were characterized using a uniaxial microcompression technique, which demonstrated that the engineering yield stress is 9 times greater than bulk and is ~1/28 of the indium shear modulus, suggesting that the attained stresses are close to theoretical strength. Microcompression of hollow indium nanopillars showed evidence of brittle fracture. This may suggest that the failure mode for one of the most ductile metals can become brittle when the feature size is sufficiently small.

Additional Information

© 2009 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Received 5 October 2009; revised 20 October 2009; accepted 26 October 2009; available online 20 November 2009. The authors gratefully acknowledge critical support and infrastructure provided for this work by the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech and the Western Nanofabrication Facility at the University of Western Ontario. T.Y. Tsui thanks Easo George, George M. Pharr, and Joost J. Vlassak for valuable discussions. His research projects are partially supported by Canadian NSERC Discovery and RTI Grants. TYT would like to thank Arash Tajik for his assistance in this project. The Advanced Light Source is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences Division, of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02- 05CH11231 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley, California. The move of the micro-diffraction program from ALS beamline 7.3.3 onto to the ALS superbend source 12.3.2 was enabled through the NSF Grant #0416243. One of the authors (ASB) is supported by the Director, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), under the Director's Postdoctoral Fellowship program (#20090513PRD2).

Additional details

Created:
August 21, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023