Electron beam-assisted healing of nanopores in magnesium alloys.

Nanopore-based sensing has emerged as a promising candidate for affordable and powerful DNA sequencing technologies. Herein, we demonstrate that nanopores can be successfully fabricated in Mg alloys via focused electron beam (e-beam) technology. Employing in situ high-resolution transmission electron microscopy techniques, we obtained unambiguous evidence that layer-by-layer growth of atomic planes at the nanopore periphery occurs when the e-beam is spread out, leading to the shrinkage and eventual disappearance of nanopores.

In situ visualization of birth and annihilation of grain boundaries in an Au nanocrystal.

The formation and vanishing processes of a low angle grain boundary (GB) in nanosized Au during tension and release of stress, respectively, were obsvered by in situ high resolution transmission electron microscopy. The nucleation of perfect dislocations led to the formation of a 15° low angle GB inside an Au nanocrystal upon off-axial tensile loading (coupled uniaxial tensile and bending stress). Strikingly, the dislocations were completely annihilated accompanied with the disappearance of the GB after the removal of external stress, indicating that plastic bending is recoverable in the nanocrystal.

Discrete plasticity in sub-10-nm-sized gold crystals.

Although deformation processes in submicron-sized metallic crystals are well documented, the direct observation of deformation mechanisms in crystals with dimensions below the sub-10-nm range is currently lacking. Here, through in situ high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) observations, we show that (1) in sharp contrast to what happens in bulk materials, in which plasticity is mediated by dislocation emission from Frank-Read sources and multiplication, partial dislocations emitted from free surfaces dominate the deformation of gold (Au) nanocrystals; (2) the crystallographic orientation (Schmid factor) is not the only factor in determining the deformation mechanism of nanometre-sized Au; and (3) the Au nanocrystal exhibits a phase transformation from a face-centered cubic to a body-centered tetragonal structure after failure. These findings provide direct experimental evidence for the vast amount of theoretical modelling on the deformation mechanisms of nanomaterials that have appeared in recent years.