Measuring grain rotation at the nanoscale

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we introduced a method to measure grain rotation of nanomaterials under external stress using a high pressure diamond anvil cell and the Laue microdiffraction technique at a synchrotron facility. We used tungsten carbide marker crystals to investigate grain rotation activities of 3 and 500 nm nickel media. Our results show that the grain rotation of 3 and 500 nm nickel nanocrystals increase with pressure and finally rotation of 500 nm nickel tends to stop at a lower pressure/stress level than 3 nm nickel. 3 nm nickel nanocrystals show a higher rotation magnitude than 500 nm nickel nanocrystals. Our measurements show an effective method to study the grain rotation of nanomaterials especially in ultrafine nanocrystals.

KEYWORDS:

• Diamond anvil cell
• laue microdiffraction
• grain rotation
• deformation
• nanomaterials

Acknowledgements

This research used resources of the Advanced Light Source, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge the support of NSAF (Grant No. U1530402). X. Z. was partially supported by the ALS Doctoral Fellowship in Residence Program.