Related papers: Volume Contraction at a Grain Boundary in Vanadium
Structural transformations at interfaces are of profound fundamental interest as complex examples of phase transitions in low-dimensional systems. Despite decades of extensive research, no compelling evidence exists for structural…
Amorphous solids, confined on the nano-scale, exhibit a wealth of novel phenomena yet to be explored. In particular, the response of such solids to a mechanical load is not well understood and, as has been demonstrated experimentally, it…
Polycrystalline hcp metals - an important class of engineering materials - typically exhibit complex plasticity because of a limited number of slip systems. Among these metals, deformation is even more complicated in cobalt as it commonly…
We measure stability of two-dimensional granular mixtures in a rotating drum and relate grain configurations to stability. For our system, the smaller but smoother grains cluster near the center of the drum, while the larger, rougher grains…
We present results from ab initio calculations of the mechanical properties of the rhombohedral phase (beta) of vanadium metal reported in recent experiments, and other predicted high-pressure phases (gamma and bcc), focusing on properties…
We study numerically and analytically the coarsening of stripe phases in two spatial dimensions, and show that transient configurations do not achieve long ranged orientational order but rather evolve into glassy configurations with very…
We present molecular dynamics simulations of the homogeneous (mechanical) melting transition of a bcc metal, vanadium. We study both the nominally perfect crystal as well as one that includes point defects. According to the Born criterion,…
Fluctuations of the local volume fraction within granular materials have previously been observed to decrease as the system approaches jamming. We experimentally examine the role of boundary conditions and inter-particle friction $\mu$ on…
A crystal lattice, when confined to the surface of a cylinder, must have a periodic structure that is commensurate with the cylinder circumference. This constraint can frustrate the system, leading to oblique crystal lattices or to…
We use a phase-field model to study the effect of confinement on dendritic growth, in a pure material solidifying in an undercooled melt, and in the directional solidification of a dilute binary alloy. Specifically, we observe the effect of…
Here we describe the results of an atomic resolution study of the structure and composition of both the interior of the grains, and the grain boundaries in polycrystalline MgB2. We find that there is no oxygen within the bulk of the grains…
Resistance of vacuum deposited ${\rm Sb_2Te_3}$ films of thickness between 100-500nm has been measured in vacuum. It is found that the resistance of the polycrystalline films strongly depends on the grain size and inter-granular voids. The…
For realistic crystals, the free energy strictly formulated in ensemble theory can hardly be obtained because of the difficulty in solving the high-dimension integral of the partition function, the dilemma of which makes it even a doubt if…
By using the finite element code ASTRA, the effect of vibrations on the melt flow in Bridgman crystal growth is investigated for the Earth and Space gravity conditions. It is found that the vibrations significantly decrease the width of…
We report the discovery of an intriguing pressure-driven phase transformation in the layered Kitaev-material $\alpha$-RuCl$_3$. By analyzing both the Bragg scattering as well as the diffuse scattering of high-quality single crystals, we…
Oriented attachment (OA) has become a well-recognized mechanism for the growth of metal, ceramic, and biomineral crystals. While many computational and experimental studies of OA have shown that particles can attach with some misorientation…
The effect of grain size on the flow strength of FCC polycrystals was analyzed by means of computational homogenization. The mechanical behavior of each grain was dictated by a dislocation-based crystal plasticity model in the context of…
We study microstructure formation in two nonconvex singularly-perturbed variational problems from materials science, one modeling austenite-martensite interfaces in shape-memory alloys, the other one slip structures in the plastic…
Conical surfaces pose an interesting challenge to crystal growth: a crystal growing on a cone can wrap around and meet itself at different radii. We use a disk-packing algorithm to investigate how this closure constraint can geometrically…
The thermodynamic theory of dislocation/grain boundary interaction, including dislocation pile-up against, absorption by, and transfer through the grain boundary, is developed for nonuniform plastic deformations in polycrystals. The case…