Related papers: Amorphous intergranular films as toughening struct…

For its potential as a catalyst, nanoporous gold (NPG) prepared through dealloying of bulk Ag-Au alloys has been extensively investigated. NPG thin films can offer ease of handling, better tunability of the chemistry and microstructure of…

We investigate theoretically the morphology of a thin nematic film adsorbed at flat substrate patterned by stripes with alternating aligning properties, normal and tangential respectively. We construct a simple "exactly-solvable" effective…

Amorphous materials of homogeneous structures usually suffer from nonuniform deformation under shear, which can develop into shear localization and eventually destructive shear band. One approach to tackle this issue is to introduce an…

Amorphous interfacial complexions have been shown to restrict grain growth and improve damage tolerance in nanocrystalline alloys, with increased chemical complexity stabilizing the complexions themselves. Here, we investigate local…

Amorphous materials lack long-range order but short-range order can still persist through the recurrence of similar local packing motifs. While the short-range order in bulk amorphous phases has been well studied and identified as an…

Granular media near jamming exhibit fascinating properties, which can be harnessed to create jammed-granulate metamaterials: materials whose characteristics arise not only from the shape and material properties of the particles at the…

The concept of mechanical screening is widely applied in solid-state systems. Examples include nucleation of defects in crystalline materials, scars and pleats in curved crystals, wrinkles in strongly confined thin sheets, and…

Many technologically useful materials are polycrystals composed of a myriad of small monocrystalline grains separated by grain boundaries. Dynamics of grain boundaries play a crucial role in determining the grain structure and defining the…

The presence of interparticle cohesion can drastically change the behavior of granular materials. For instance, powders are challenging to handle, and one can make a sandcastle using wet grains. In this study, we report experimental results…

The effective adhesive properties of heterogeneous thin films are characterized through a combined experimental and theoretical investigation. By bridging scales, we show how variations of elastic or adhesive properties at the microscale…

External magnetic fields influence the microstructure of polycrystalline materials. We explore the influence of strong external magnetic fields on the long time scaling of grain size during coarsening in thin films with an extended…

Thin films made of deformable micro- and nano-units, such as biological membranes, polymer interfaces, and particle-laden liquid surfaces, exhibit a complex behavior during drying, with consequences for various applications like wound…

We consider a model of a thin film elastically attached to a rigid substrate. In the case in which the film expands relative to the substrate and assuming certain non-linear elastic behavior of the film, expansion ridges may appear, in…

We use molecular simulations to explore how sample dimensions and interfacial properties impact some generic aspects of the mechanical and structural behavior of nanoconfined materials. Specifically, we calculate the strain-dependent…

Microscopic models of the interaction between grain boundaries (GBs) and both dislocations and cracks are of importance in understanding the role of microstructure in altering the mechanical properties of a material. A recently developed…

There are a large number of atomically thin graphitic films with similar structure to graphene. These films have a spread of bandgaps relating to their ionicity, and also to the substrate on which they are grown. Such films could have a…

In the last decades severe plastic deformation techniques have gained increasing interest as they allow the production of bulk nanostructured materials with superior mechanical and functional properties. However, because of mechanically…

Intergranular fracture in polycrystals is often simulated by finite elements coupled to a cohesive-zone model for the interfaces, requiring cohesive laws for grain boundaries as a function of their geometry. We discuss three challenges in…

It was recently reported that segregation of Zr to grain boundaries (GB) in nanocrystalline Cu can lead to the formation of disordered intergranular films [1,2]. In this study we employ atomistic computer simulations to study how the…

Amorphous silicon films prepared by electron beam evaporation have systematically and substantially greater atomic density for higher thickness, higher growth temperature, and slower deposition rate, reaching the density of crystalline Si…