Related papers: Grain refinement and partitioning of impurities in…
In established theories of grain coarsening, grains disappear either by shrinking or by rotating as a rigid object to coalesce with an adjacent grain. Here we report a third mechanism for grain coarsening, in which a grain splits apart into…
We investigate how the microstructure of a colloidal polycrystal influences its linear viscoelasticity. We use thermosensitive copolymer micelles that arrange in water in a cubic crystalline lattice, yielding a colloidal polycrystal. The…
Metal nano-aerogels combine a large surface area, a high structural stability, and a high catalytic activity towards a variety of chemical reactions. The performance of such nanostructures is underpinned by the atomic-level distribution of…
Impurities in crystalline materials introduce disorder into an otherwise ordered structure due to the formation of lattice defects and grain boundaries. The properties of the resulting polycrystal can differ remarkably from those of the…
We use confocal microscopy and time-resolved light scattering to investigate plasticity in a col- loidal polycrystal, following the evolution of the network of grain boundaries as the sample is submitted to thousands of shear deformation…
Tailoring the nanoscale distribution of chemical species at grain boundaries is a powerful method to dramatically influence the properties of polycrystalline materials. However, classical approaches to the problem have tacitly assumed that…
This study proposes a new analytical model for grain boundary pinning by second phase particles in two-dimensional polycrystals. This approach not only considers how particles impede grain growth, but also elucidates their role in…
Solute segregation in materials with grain boundaries (GBs) has emerged as a popular method to thermodynamically stabilize nanocrystalline structures. However, the impact of varied GB crystallographic character on solute segregation has…
Nanocrystalline materials are defined by their fine grain size, but details of the grain boundary character distribution should also be important. Grain boundary character distributions are reported for ball milled, sputter deposited, and…
The structure and evolution of grain boundaries underlies the nature of polycrystalline materials. Here we describe an experimental apparatus and light reflection technique for measuring disorder at grain boundaries in optically clear…
Soft-solid molecular crystals consist of crystalline grains and fluid grain boundaries (GB) that enhance grain binding and transport of Li+ ions between the grains. The total ionic conductivity consists of ion migration in both the grains…
Nanocrystalline metals, i.e. metals with grain sizes from 5 to 50 nm, display technologically interesting properties, such as dramatically increased hardness, increasing with decreasing grain size. Due to the small grain size, direct…
Grain growth fundamentally shapes the microstructure of crystalline materials upon annealing, affecting their overall mechanical and functional properties. Recently, it has been rationalized that grain growth in polycrystals does not result…
Polarization at millimeter wavelengths provides a powerful diagnostic of dust grain properties in protoplanetary disks. Standard models based on solid spherical grains often struggle to reproduce the observed polarization fractions and…
While the microscopic structure of defected solid crystalline materials has significant impact on their physical properties, efficient and accurate determination of a given polycrystalline microstructure remains a challenge. In this paper…
We design, fabricate and test heterogeneous architected polycrystals, composed of hard plastomers and soft elastomers, which thus show outstanding mechanical resilience and energy dissipation simultaneously. Grain boundaries that separate…
We find that laser-induced local melting attracts and deforms grain boundaries in 2D colloidal crystals. When a melted region in contact with the edge of a crystal grain recrystallizes, it deforms the grain boundary --- this attraction is…
Using computer simulations we explore how grain boundaries can be removed from three-dimensional colloidal crystals by doping with a small fraction of active colloids. We show that for sufficient self-propulsion, the system is driven into a…
Nanocrystalline (NC) materials are intrinsically unstable against grain growth. Significant research efforts have been dedicated to suppressing the grain growth by solute segregation, including the pursuit of a special NC structure that…
X-ray nanodiffraction is applied to study the formation and correlation of domain boundaries in mesocrystalline superlattices of PbS nanocrystals with face-centered cubic structure. Each domain of the superlattice can be described with one…