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Plasticity in the nanoscale Cu/Nb single-crystal multilayers as revealed by synchrotron Laue x-ray microdiffraction

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Abstract

There is much interest in the recent years in the nanoscale metallic multilayered composite materials due to their unusual mechanical properties, such as very high flow strength and stable plastic flow to large strains. These unique mechanical properties have been proposed to result from the interface-dominated plasticity mechanisms in nanoscale composite materials. Studying how the dislocation configurations and densities evolve during deformation will be crucial in understanding the yield, work hardening, and recovery mechanisms in the nanolayered materials. In an effort to shed light on these topics, uniaxial compression experiments on nanoscale Cu/Nb single-crystal multilayer pillars using ex situ synchrotron-based Laue x-ray microdiffraction technique were conducted. Using this approach, we studied the nanoscale Cu/Nb multilayer pillars before and after uniaxial compression to about 14% of plastic strain and found significant Laue peak broadening in the Cu phase, which indicates storage of statistically stored dislocations, while no significant Laue peak broadening was observed in the Nb phase in the nanoscale multilayers. These observations suggest that at 14% plastic strain of the nanolayered pillars, the deformation was dominated by plasticity in the Cu nanolayers and elasticity or possibly a zero net plasticity (due to the possibility of annihilation of interface dislocations) in the Nb nanolayers.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge critical support and infrastructure provided for this work by the Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences. We thank R.G. Hoagland and J.P. Hirth for insightful discussions. W.D. Nix is gratefully acknowledged for his support in providing the nanomechanical testing facility at Stanford. The Advanced Light Source is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences Division of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02–05CH11231 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley, California. The move of the microdiffraction program from ALS beamline 7.3.3 onto to the ALS superbend source 12.3.2 was enabled through the NSF Grant No. 0416243. One of the authors (ASB) is supported by the Director, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), under the Director’s Postdoctoral Research Fellowship program (LDRD/X93V). The research at KAIST was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea under Contract N01110283 and the KINC grant at KAIST under Contract N10110033.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 87545, USA

    Arief Suriadi Budimana, Patricia Dickerson & Amit Misra

  2. Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, USA

    Seung-Min Hanb, Nan Li, Qiang-Min Wei & Nobumichi Tamura

  3. Graduate School of Energy, Environment and Water Sustainability, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Daejeon, 305-701, Korea

    Qiang-Min Wei

  4. Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA

    Martin Kunz

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  1. Arief Suriadi Budimana
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Correspondence to Patricia Dickerson.

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This author was an editor of this focus issue during the review and decision stage. For the JMR policy on review and publication of manuscripts authored by editors, please refer to http://www.mrs.org/jmr-editor-manuscripts/

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Budimana, A.S., Hanb, SM., Li, N. et al. Plasticity in the nanoscale Cu/Nb single-crystal multilayers as revealed by synchrotron Laue x-ray microdiffraction. Journal of Materials Research 27, 599–611 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2011.421

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