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Published March 15, 2012 | public
Journal Article

Plasticity of indium nanostructures as revealed by synchrotron X-ray microdiffraction

Abstract

Indium columnar structures with diameters near 1 μm were deformed by uniaxial compression at strain rates of approximately 0.01 and 0.001 s^(−1). Defect density evolution in the nanopillars was evaluated by applying synchrotron Laue X-ray microdiffraction (μSLXRD) on the same specimens before and after deformation. Results of the μSLXRD measurements indicate that the dislocation density increases as a result of mechanical deformation and is a strong function of strain rate. These results suggest that the rate of defect generation during the compression tests exceeds the rate of defect annihilation, implying that plasticity in these indium nanostructures commences via dislocation multiplication rather than nucleation processes. This is in contrast with the behaviors of other materials at the nanoscale, such as, gold, tin, molybdenum, and bismuth. A hypothesis based on the dislocation mean-free-path prior to the multiplication process is proposed to explain this variance.

Additional Information

© 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Received 10 August 2011. Revised 9 December 2011. Accepted 9 January 2012. Available online 17 January 2012. The authors gratefully acknowledge critical support and infrastructure provided for this work by the Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, and Office of Basic Energy Sciences. W.D. Nix is gratefully acknowledged for his support in providing the nanomechanical testing facility at Stanford. The Advanced Light Source is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences Division, of the U.S. 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 Research Fellowship program (LDRD/X93V). T.Y. Tsui thanks Canadian NSERC Discovery, NSERC Research Tools and Instruments, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) for the financial support of this research. JRG gratefully acknowledges the support of Office of Naval Research (ONR) through grant N000140910883. S.M. Han would like to thank National Research Foundation of Korea under the contract No. N01110283.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 17, 2023