Ultrafast visualization of incipient plasticity in dynamically compressed matter

Mianzhen Mo; Minxue Tang; Zhijiang Chen; J Ryan Peterson; Xiaozhe Shen; John Kevin Baldwin; Mungo Frost; Mike Kozina; Alexander Reid; Yongqiang Wang; Juncheng E; Adrien Descamps; Benjamin K Ofori-Okai; Renkai Li; Sheng-Nian Luo; Xijie Wang; Siegfried Glenzer

doi:10.1038/s41467-022-28684-z

Ultrafast visualization of incipient plasticity in dynamically compressed matter

Nat Commun. 2022 Feb 25;13(1):1055. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-28684-z.

Authors

Mianzhen Mo^#¹, Minxue Tang^#², Zhijiang Chen³, J Ryan Peterson^{3

4}, Xiaozhe Shen³, John Kevin Baldwin⁵, Mungo Frost³, Mike Kozina³, Alexander Reid³, Yongqiang Wang^{5

6}, Juncheng E⁷, Adrien Descamps^{3

8}, Benjamin K Ofori-Okai³, Renkai Li³, Sheng-Nian Luo⁹, Xijie Wang¹⁰, Siegfried Glenzer¹¹

Affiliations

¹ SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA, 94025, USA. mmo09@slac.stanford.edu.
² School of Materials Science and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, 610031, P. R. China.
³ SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA, 94025, USA.
⁴ Physics Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA.
⁵ Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, 87545, USA.
⁶ Materials Science and Technology Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, 87545, USA.
⁷ European XFEL GmbH, 22869, Schenefeld, Germany.
⁸ Aeronautics and Astronautics Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA.
⁹ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, 610031, P. R. China. sluo@swjtu.edu.cn.
¹⁰ SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA, 94025, USA. wangxj@slac.stanford.edu.
¹¹ SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA, 94025, USA. glenzer@slac.stanford.edu.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Plasticity is ubiquitous and plays a critical role in material deformation and damage; it inherently involves the atomistic length scale and picosecond time scale. A fundamental understanding of the elastic-plastic deformation transition, in particular, incipient plasticity, has been a grand challenge in high-pressure and high-strain-rate environments, impeded largely by experimental limitations on spatial and temporal resolution. Here, we report femtosecond MeV electron diffraction measurements visualizing the three-dimensional (3D) response of single-crystal aluminum to the ultrafast laser-induced compression. We capture lattice transitioning from a purely elastic to a plastically relaxed state within 5 ps, after reaching an elastic limit of ~25 GPa. Our results allow the direct determination of dislocation nucleation and transport that constitute the underlying defect kinetics of incipient plasticity. Large-scale molecular dynamics simulations show good agreement with the experiment and provide an atomic-level description of the dislocation-mediated plasticity.

Abstract

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