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Abstract
Adding nanoparticles to soft matter and liquids is known to provide remarkable control in the processing of novel materials. Here, we demonstrate a similar potential in crystalline solids. Specifically, we show that the addition of a high density of W nanoparticles dramatically alters the coarsening behavior of precipitate-hardened Cu–Ag alloys. First, the nanoparticles suppress precipitate growth, but far more surprisingly, they induce non-equilibrium Ag wetting layers on grain boundaries. This observation is explained using kinetic Monte Carlo simulations, which show that caging of Ag precipitates by the W nanoparticles suppresses their growth and drives the formation of wetting layers.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by US National Science Foundation under Grant Number DMR-1306475. The work was carried out in part in the Frederick-Seitz Materials Research Laboratory Central Facilities, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Supplementary online material
A more detailed information on experiments is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21663831.2015.1090496http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21663831.2015.1090496
ORCID
Shipeng Shu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3859-5014