Related papers: From Deposition Stress to Surface Reactivity: Stra…
Dual-phase Zr-based thin films synthesized by magnetron co-sputtering and showing competitive growth between amorphous and crystalline phases have been reported recently. In such films, the amorphous phase grows as columns, while the…
The dewetting dynamics of an ultrathin film is studied in the presence of evaporation - or reaction - of adatoms on the substrate. KMC simulations are in good agreement with an analytical model with diffusion, rim facetting, and substrate…
We present a comparative study of copper film growth with a constant energy neutral beam, thermal evaporation, dc magnetron sputtering, high-power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiP-IMS), and bipolar HiPIMS, through molecular dynamics…
Vapor deposition on polycrystalline films can lead to staggering levels of compressive stress, exceeding even the yield strength of the films. Mysteriously, a significant part of this stress has a reversible nature: it disappears when the…
Catalyzing capping layers on top of metal hydrides are often employed to enhance the hydrogenation kinetics of metal-hydride based systems such as hydrogen sensors. Here, we experimentally study the hydrogenation kinetics of capping layers…
Dewetting of ultrathin (< 100 nm) polymer films, by heating above the glass transition, produces droplets of sizes of the order of microns and mean separations between droplets of the order of tens of microns. These relatively large length…
In the presented research, the intergranular elastic interaction and the second-order plastic incompatibility stress in textured ferritic and austenitic steels were investigated by means of diffraction. The lattice strains were measured…
We report first-principle atomistic simulations on the effect of local strain gradients on the nanoscale domain morphology of free-standing PbTiO$_3$ ultrathin films. First, the ferroelectric properties of free films at the atomic level are…
We study numerically the effect of thermal fluctuations and of variable fluid-substrate interactions on the spontaneous dewetting of thin liquid films. To this aim, we use a recently developed lattice Boltzmann method for thin liquid film…
VO2 is a strongly correlated material, which undergoes a reversible metal insulator transition (MIT) coupled to a structural phase transition upon heating (T= 67{\deg} C). Since its discovery the nature of the insulating state has long been…
We performed the experimental and theoretical study of the heating and damaging of ruthenium thin films induced by femtosecond laser irradiation. Results of an optical pump-probe thermoreflectance experiment with rotating sample allowing to…
Heterostructures of wurtzite based devices have attracted great research interests since the tremendous success of GaN in light emitting diodes (LED) industry. Among the possible heterostructure material candidates, high quality GaN thin…
Water-metal interfaces are ubiquitous and play a key role in many chemical processes, from catalysis to corrosion. Whereas water adlayers on atomically flat transition metal surfaces have been investigated in depth, little is known about…
Bulk single-crystal relaxor-ferroelectrics, like Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3-PbTiO3 (PMN-PT), are widely known for their large piezoelectricity. This is attributed to polarization rotation which is facilitated by the presence of various crystal…
We present a new type of temperature driven spin reorientation transition (SRT) in thin films. It can occur when the lattice and the shape anisotropy favor different easy directions of the magnetization. Due to different temperature…
Strain engineering is the art of inducing controlled lattice distortions in a material to modify specific physicochemical properties. Strain engineering is applied for basic fundamental studies of physics and chemistry of solids but also…
Metallic films are important in catalysis, magneto-optic storage media, and interconnects in microelectronics, and it is crucial to predict and control their morphologies. The evolution of a growing crystal is determined by the behavior of…
We investigate dilation-induced surface deformations in a Discontinuous Shear Thickening (DST) suspension to determine the relationship between dilation and stresses in DST. Video is taken at two observation points on the surface of the…
Density functional theory (DFT) was employed to study the stress-strain behavior, elastic instabilities, and metallization during a solid-solid phase transformation (PT) between semiconducting Si I (cubic A4) and metallic Si II (tetragonal…
When stressed sufficiently, solid materials yield and deform plastically via reorganization of microscopic constituents. Indeed, it is possible to alter the micro-structure of materials by judicious application of stress, an empirical pro-…