Challenging the ideal strength limit in single-crystalline gold nanoflakes through phase engineering.

ABSTRACT: Materials usually fracture before reaching their ideal strength limits. Meanwhile, materials with high strength generally have poor ductility, and vice versa. For example, gold with the conventional face-centered cubic (FCC) phase is highly ductile while the yield strength (~10²MPa) is significantly lower than its ideal theoretical limit. Here, through phase engineering, we show that defect-free single-crystalline gold nanoflakes with the hexagonal close-packed (HCP) phase can exhibit a strength of 6.0 GPa, which is beyond the ideal theoretical limit of the conventional FCC counterpart. The lattice structure is thickness-dependent and the FCC-HCP phase transformation happens in the range of 11-13 nm. Suspended-nanoindentations based on atomic force microscopy (AFM) show that th

SUBMITTER: Zhang T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11754920 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature