Structural transformation in monolayer materials: a 2D to 1D transformation.

Reducing the dimensions of materials to atomic scales results in a large portion of atoms being at or near the surface, with lower bond order and thus higher energy. At such scales, reduction of the surface energy and surface stresses can be the driving force for the formation of new low-dimensional nanostructures, and may be exhibited through surface relaxation and/or surface reconstruction, which can be utilized for tailoring the properties and phase transformation of nanomaterials without applying any external load. Here we used atomistic simulations and revealed an intrinsic structural transformation in monolayer materials that lowers their dimension from 2D nanosheets to 1D nanostructures to reduce their surface and elastic energies.

Interactive visualization of APT data at full fidelity.

Understanding the impact of noise and incomplete data is a critical need for using atom probe tomography effectively. Although many tools and techniques have been developed to address this problem, visualization of the raw data remains an important part of this process. In this paper, we present two contributions to the visualization of data acquired through atom probe tomography.

Scale-free intermittent flow in crystal plasticity.

Under stress, crystals irreversibly deform through complex dislocation processes that intermittently change the microscopic material shape through isolated slip events. These underlying processes can be revealed in the statistics of the discrete changes. Through ultraprecise nanoscale measurements on nickel microcrystals, we directly determined the size of discrete slip events.

Dislocation structures and the deformation of materials.

We present results from phase-field simulations of a two-dimensional model of dislocation microstructure development under increasing strain that incorporates the effects of the full, three-dimensional, microstructure in an approximate way. Despite its simplicity, the model yields quantitative predictions of both the deformation properties of face-centered cubic metals as well as key descriptors of the evolving microstructure over a wide range of stress and strain. The present results have important implications for how we interpret and describe the deformation properties of fcc materials.

Avalanches and scaling in plastic deformation.

Plastic deformation of crystalline materials is a complex nonhomogeneous process characterized by avalanches in the motion of dislocations. We study the evolution of dislocation loops using an analytically solvable phase-field model of dislocations for ductile single crystals during monotonic loading. The distribution of dislocation loop sizes is given by P(A) approximately A-sigma, with sigma=1.