Harvesting superior intrinsic plasticity in nitride ceramics with negative stacking fault energy
Yong Huang, Zhuo Chen, Michael Meindlhumer, Rainer Hahn, David Holec, Thomas Leiner, Verena Maier‐Kiener, Yonghui Zheng, Zequn Zhang, Zequn Zhang, Lukas Hatzenbichler, H. Riedl, Christian Mitterer, Zaoli Zhang, Zaoli Zhang
Abstract
Ceramics face an everlasting challenge from their intrinsic brittleness at room temperature, which can lead to early-stage catastrophic failures. The fatal disadvantage primarily results from the high critical-resolved shear stress required to initiate dislocation movement and the limited number of operational slip systems. Here, we propose a new strategy for designing deformable ceramics by negative stacking fault energy (SFE), which realizes energetic barrier reduction of dislocation motion and slip system expansion. This way, we harvested a superior room-temperature compressive plasticity in TiN/TaN superlattice by successive and extensive atomic plane faulting and twinning. This strategy sheds light on the design of intrinsically ductile ceramics.