Chong Wang¹, Zeya Li², Yingchun Cheng¹, Xiao-Ji Weng^1*, Yeqiang Bu³, Kun Zhai¹, Tianyu Xue¹, Hongtao Yuan^2*, Anmin Nie^1*, Xiang-Feng Zhou¹, Hongtao Wang³, Yongjun Tian¹, Zhongyuan Liu¹

1 Center for High Pressure Science, State Key Laboratory of Metastable Materials Science and Technology, Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao, 066044, China

2 College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Artificial Functional Materials, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China

3 Center for X-mechanics, School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.

* Corresponding authors emails: xjweng@ysu.edu.cn, htyuan@nju.edu.cn, anmin@ysu.edu.cn

DOI10.24435/materialscloud:98-53 [version v1]

Publication date: Jan 23, 2025

How to cite this record

Chong Wang, Zeya Li, Yingchun Cheng, Xiao-Ji Weng, Yeqiang Bu, Kun Zhai, Tianyu Xue, Hongtao Yuan, Anmin Nie, Xiang-Feng Zhou, Hongtao Wang, Yongjun Tian, Zhongyuan Liu, A directional tensile superelasticity in ceramic crystal via reversible shuffle twinning, Materials Cloud Archive 2025.17 (2025), https://doi.org/10.24435/materialscloud:98-53

Description

Superelasticity, being a reversible nonlinear strain response to stress stimuli beyond the linear elastic regime, is always associated with phase transformations in its host materials, mostly metals or polymers. Theoretical rationale indicates that inorganic materials with covalent/ionic bonding normally have large energy barriers for reversible structural transitions and thus host less opportunity to achieve superelasticity. Here, we demonstrate a directional tensile superelasticity in ceramic crystal GeSe through an unconventional reversible shuffle twinning mechanism instead of martensitic phase transition. We observed, with in-situ mechanical transmission electron microscopy, an evolution in stress‒strain curve from the linear elastic behavior to a nonlinear superelastic plateau, and confirmed that such superelasticity appears simultaneously together with the generation of stripy-shaped twin domains along orientation. Theoretical calculations revealed that the shuffle twinning process from “Z-shaped” to “anti-Z-shaped” bond-configuration leads to the release of elastic potential energy, being responsible for the emergence of tensile superelasticity therein. Note that such a highly-directional superelasticity prefers to emerge at angles near the zigzag direction owing to the anisotropic Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio in GeSe, and has never been reported in superelastic materials. Our observation provides a novel strategy to exploit tensile superelasticity and nonlinear mechanics for advanced mechanical and flexible electronics.

Materials Cloud sections using this data

Files

File name	Size	Description
Additional In-situ TEM videos of GeSe superelasticity.zip MD5md5:871cdcad431994852f3412e42acd1621	2.2 GiB	The videos recording the evolution of twin domains in GeSe via in-situ TEM
GeSe-videos-caption.txt MD5md5:f036b65793f9d93bda6f0e17d767e00e	1.0 KiB	Captions of "Additional In-situ TEM videos of GeSe superelasticity"

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Keywords

Superelasticity Shuffle twinning In-situ TEM