Abstract
Interface engineering has become an important strategy for designing radiation-resistant materials. Critical to its success is fundamental understanding of the interactions between interfaces and radiation-induced defects, such as voids. Using transmission electron microscopy, here we report an interesting phenomenon in their interaction, wherein voids adhere to only one side of the bimetal interfaces rather than overlapping them. We show that this asymmetrical void-interface interaction is a consequence of differing surface energies of the two metals and non-uniformity in their interface formation energy. Specifically, voids grow within the phase of lower surface energy and wet only the high-interface energy regions. Furthermore, because this outcome cannot be accounted for by wetting of interfaces with uniform internal energy, our report provides experimental evidence that bimetal interfaces contain non-uniform internal energy distributions. This work also indicates that to design irradiation-resistant materials, we can avoid void-interface overlap via tuning the configurations of interfaces.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 15428 |
| Journal | Scientific reports |
| Volume | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 21 2015 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work is supported by the Center for Materials at Irradiation and Mechanical Extremes, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Award Number 2008LANL1026. This work was performed, in part, at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, an Office of Science User Facility operated for the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science. S. Z. gratefully acknowledges support for this research by “Hundred Talents Project” of Chinese Academy of Sciences, National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 51401208), and Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science (grant number 2015RP18).