Related papers: Understanding the movements of metal whiskers
Needle shaped whiskers grow on various metal surfaces often across leads of a package causing current leakage or short circuits and raising reliability issues in electronic components. The nature of metal whiskers remains a mystery after…
The phenomenon of spontaneously growing metal whiskers (MW) raises significant reliability concerns due to its related arcing and shorting in electric equipment. The growth kinetics of MW remains poorly predictable. Here we present a theory…
The existence of metal whiskers is attributed to the energy gain due to electrostatic polarization of needle shaped metal filaments in the electric field induced by surface imperfections: contaminations, oxide states, etc. A proposed theory…
We present TEM images of the interior of metal whiskers (MW) grown on electroplated Sn films. Along with earlier published information, our observations focus on a number of questions, such as why MWs' diameters are in the micron range…
Lithium metal batteries are promising for next-generation high-energy-density batteries, especially when lithium is directly plated on a current collector. However, lithium whiskers can form in the early stages of electroplating. These…
Blindfolded harbor seals are able to use their uniquely shaped whiskers to track vortex wakes left by moving animals and objects that passed by up to 30 seconds earlier; this is an impressive feat as the flow features they detect may have…
In this work, a very high, locally applied electric field was used to induce whisker nucleation on an Sn film. The field was generated by using a conductive AFM tip and applying a voltage bias between the sample and the conductive…
Whistler mode wave is a fundamental perturbation of electromagnetic fields and plasmas in various environments including planetary space, laboratory and astrophysics. The origin and evolution of the waves are a long-standing question due to…
Active components incorporated in materials generate motion by inducing conformational changes in response to external fields. Magnetic fields are particularly interesting as they can actuate materials remotely. Millimeter-sized ferrofluid…
Sensing the flow of water or air disturbance is critical for the survival of many animals: flow information helps them localize food, mates, and prey and to escape predators. Across species, many flow sensors take the form of long, flexible…
Mechanical oscillations are important for many cellular processes, e.g. the beating of cilia and flagella or the sensation of sound by hair cells. These dynamic states originate from spontaneous oscillations of molecular motors. A…
Branching is an essential element of streamer discharge dynamics but today it is understood only qualitatively. The variability and irregularity observed in branched streamer trees suggest that stochastic terms are relevant for the…
Characterizing the interaction between water and microscopic defects is one of the long-standing challenges in understanding a broad range of cracking processes. Different physical aspects of microscopic events, driven or influenced by…
We study metallic transport in an effective model that describes the coupling of electrons to fluctuating magnetic moments with full SU(2) symmetry, exhibiting characteristic behavior of metals at the approach of the Mott transition. We…
The exploration of the rich dynamics of electrons is a frontier in fundamental nano-physics. The dynamical behavior of electrons is dominated by random and chaotic thermal motion with ultrafast ($\approx$ ps) and nanoscale scatterings. This…
Needle-like metallic particles have been suggested to explain a wide variety of astrophysical phenomena, ranging from the mid-infrared interstellar extinction to the thermalization of starlight to generate the cosmic microwave background.…
During plastic deformation, metals change shape while continuously becoming stronger. The microscopic origin of these processes lies in the proliferation and movement of line defects, dislocations, and the subsequent self-organisation and…
We compare the statistics of tin whisker diameters to that of the underlying film grains. Both are well approximated by the lognormal distributions. However, the parameters of those distributions can be rather different, not confirming the…
By employing a local two-fluid theory, we investigate an obliquely propagating electromagnetic instability in the lower hybrid frequency range driven by cross-field current or relative drifts between electrons and ions. The theory…
A liquid drop moves on a solid surface if it is subjected to a gradient of wettability or temperature. However, the pinning defects on the surface manifested in terms of a wetting hysteresis, or first-order nonlinear friction, limit the…