Hard nanocrystalline gold materials prepared via high-pressure phase transformation

As one of the important materials,nanocrystalline Au(n-Au)has gained numerous interests in recent decades owing to its unique properties and promising applications.However,most of the current n-Au thin films are supported on substrates,limiting the study on their mechanical properties and applications.Therefore,it is urgently desired to develop a new strategy to prepare nAu materials with superior mechanical strength and hardness.Here,a hard n-Au material with an average grain size of~40 nm is prepared by cold-forging of the unique Au nanoribbons(NRBs)with unconventional 4H phase under high pressure.Systematic characterizations reveal the phase transformation from 4H to face-centered cubic(fcc)phase during the cold compression.Impressively,the compressive yield strength and Vickers hardness(HV)of the prepared n-Au material reach~140.2 MPa and~1.0 GPa,which are 4.2 and 2.2 times of the microcrystalline Au foil,respectively.This work demonstrates that the combination of high-pressure cold-forging and the in-situ 4H-to-fcc phase transformation can effectively inhibit the grain growth in the obtained n-Au materials,leading to the formation of novel hard n-Au materials.Our strategy opens up a new avenue for the preparation of nanocrystalline metals with superior mechanical property.

In situ observation of the pseudoelasticity of twin boundary

Twin boundary(TB)is a special and fundamental internal interface that plays a key role in altering the mechanical and physical properties of materials.However,the atomistic deformation mechanism of TB re-mains under debate,of which the most concerned aspect is how TB would affect the mechanical strength and plasticity of a material.Herein,we introduce our new discovery that the pseudoelastic strain of a TB can recover with decomposition and escape of pile-up dislocations,demonstrated by imposing a sponta-neous pseudoelastic deformation with recoverable plastic bending strain up to 5.1%on a TB.We found that the steps on the curved TB gradually annihilated during the migration of the TB,which was in-duced by the slip of decomposition dislocations on the TB.The TB not only provides local strain harden-ing through interaction with dislocations during the loading stage but also acts as a channel for the fast movement of decomposition dislocations during the recovery stage.Beside,the TB can maintain excellent pseudoelasticity under a multicycle bending test,which may play an important role in improving the fa-tigue resistance of materials.These findings could open up a new avenue for optimizing the mechanical properties of materials by manipulating their twin boundaries at the nanoscale.