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Scale-dependent pop-ins in nanoindentation and scale-free plastic fluctuations in microcompression

  • Nanomechanics and Testing
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Abstract

Nanoindentation and microcrystal deformation are two methods that allow probing size effects in crystal plasticity. In many cases of microcrystal deformation, scale-free and potentially universal intermittency of event sizes during plastic flow has been revealed, whereas nanoindentation has been mainly used to assess the stress statistics of the first pop-in. Here, we show that both methods of deformation exhibit fundamentally different event-size statistics obtained from plastic instabilities. Nanoindentation results in scale-dependent intermittent microplasticity best described by Weibull statistics (stress and magnitude of the first pop-in) and lognormal statistics (magnitude of higher-order pop-ins). In contrast, finite-volume microcrystal deformation of the same material exhibits microplastic event-size intermittency of truncated power-law type even when the same plastic volume as in nanoindentation is probed. Furthermore, we successfully test a previously proposed extreme-value statistics model that relates the average first critical stress to the shape and scale parameter of the underlying Weibull distribution.

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Acknowledgments

This research was carried out in part in the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory Central Research Facilities, University of Illinois. R.M. is grateful for financial support by the NSF CAREER program (grant NSF DMR 1654065), and for start-up funds provided by the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UIUC. The authors also thank J. Spears for conducting AFM measurements.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, 61801, USA

    John Shimanek, Quentin Rizzardi, Gregory Sparks & Robert Maaß

  2. Condensed Matter Theory Group, Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen-PSI, 5232, Switzerland

    Peter M. Derlet

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  1. John Shimanek
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  2. Quentin Rizzardi
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Correspondence to Robert Maaß.

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Shimanek, J., Rizzardi, Q., Sparks, G. et al. Scale-dependent pop-ins in nanoindentation and scale-free plastic fluctuations in microcompression. Journal of Materials Research 35, 196–205 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2019.386

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