Related papers: Extended defects in natural diamonds: Atomic Force…
There is growing interest in promoting deformation twinning for plasticity in advanced materials, as highly organized twin boundaries are beneficial to better strength-ductility combination in contrast to disordered grain boundaries.…
Nickel ditelluride (NiTe2), a new discovered type-II Dirac semimetal whose Dirac node lies close to its Fermi level, is expected to exhibit exotic phenomena including Lifshitz transition and superconductivity. As we know, defects are…
Tight-binding molecular dynamics simulations shed light into the fracture mechanisms and the ideal strength of tetrahedral amorphous carbon and of nanocomposite carbon containing diamond crystallites, two of the hardest materials. It is…
The nature of defects in amorphous materials, analogous to vacancies and dislocations in crystals, remains elusive. Here we explore their nature in a three-dimensional microscopic model glass-former which describes granular, colloidal,…
Impacts of individual slow highly charged ions on alkaline earth halide and alkali halide surfaces create nano-scale surface modifications. For different materials and impact energies a wide variety of topographic alterations have been…
Point defects in diamond are of high interest as candidates for realizing solid state quantum bits, bioimaging agents, or ultrasensitive electric or magnetic field sensors. Various artificial diamond synthesis methods should introduce…
Metals with fcc structure may exhibit deformation twinning under specific conditions, which is an interesting but somewhat elusive aspect of their deformation behavior. It is well acknowledged that the phenomenon occurs through the…
The crystalline structure of minerals due to the highly ordered assembly of its constituent atoms, ions or molecules confers a considerable hardness and brittleness to the materials. As a result, they are generally subject to fracture. Here…
Plastic deformation of micron-scale crystalline solids exhibits stress-strain curves with significant sample-to-sample variations. It is a pertinent question if this variability is purely random or to some extent predictable. Here we show,…
The sharp optical resonances of NV- centers in diamond at cryogenic temperatures offer powerful new capabilities for material characterization, but extracting the most detailed information typically requires careful calibration of…
We present a density functional theory analysis of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond which are located in the vicinity of extended defects, namely intrinsic stacking faults (ISF), extrinsic stacking faults (ESF), and coherent twin…
Atomic level defects such as dislocations play key roles in determining the macroscopic properties of crystalline materials. Their effects are important and wide-reaching, and range from increased chemical reactivity to enhanced mechanical…
Detecting a non-zero electric dipole moment (EDM) in a particle would unambiguously signify physics beyond the Standard Model. A potential pathway towards this is the detection of a nuclear Schiff moment, the magnitude of which is enhanced…
Through millennia humans exploited the natural property of metals to get stronger or hardened when mechanically deformed. Ultimately rooted in the motion of dislocations, mechanisms of metal hardening remained in the crosshairs of physical…
Further improvements are made to the non-linear data analysis algorithm for the atomic force microscope [P. Attard, arXiv:1212.3019v2 (2012)]. The algorithm is required when there is curvature in the compliance region due to photo-diode…
We generalize, and then use, a recently introduced formalism to study thermal fluctuations of atomic displacements in several two and three dimensional crystals. We study both close packed as well as open crystals with multi atom bases.…
By efficient nanoscale plasma etching, the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond were brought to the sample surface step by step successfully. At each depth, we used the relative ratios of spin coherence times before and after applying…
Sensing techniques based on the negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centre in diamond have emerged as promising candidates to characterise ultra-thin and 2D materials. An outstanding challenge to this goal is isolating the contribution…
Single-layer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) can adopt two distinct structures corresponding to different coordination of the metal atoms. TMDCs adopting the T-type structure exhibit a rich and diverse set of phenomena, including…
Climate change motivates the search for non-carbon-emitting energy generation and storage solutions. Metal hydrides show promising characteristics for this purpose. They can be further stabilized by tailoring the negative pressure of…