CaltechAUTHORS
Published July 16, 2021 | Version Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Shear induced deformation twinning evolution in thermoelectric InSb

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Wuhan University of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon University of Nevada Reno
  • 3. ROR icon California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Twin boundary (TB) engineering has been widely applied to enhance the strength and plasticity of metals and alloys, but is rarely adopted in thermoelectric (TE) semiconductors. Our previous first-principles results showed that nanotwins can strengthen TE Indium Antimony (InSb) through In–Sb covalent bond rearrangement at the TBs. Herein, we further show that shear-induced deformation twinning enhances plasticity of InSb. We demonstrate this by employing large-scale molecular dynamics (MD) to follow the shear stress response of flawless single-crystal InSb along various slip systems. We observed that the maximum shear strain for the (111)[112¯] slip system can be up to 0.85 due to shear-induced deformation twinning. We attribute this deformation twinning to the "catching bond" involving breaking and re-formation of In–Sb bond in InSb. This finding opens up a strategy to increase the plasticity of TE InSb by deformation twinning, which is expected to be implemented in other isotypic III–V semiconductors with zinc blende structure.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2021. Published in partnership with the Shanghai Institute of Ceramics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 06 May 2021. Accepted 23 June 2021. Published 16 July 2021. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (number 52022074, 51972253, and 51772231), the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (2020CFB202), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (WUT: 2020III031 and 2020IB001). We acknowledge Sandia National Laboratories for distributing the open-source MD software LAMMPS. Author Contributions. G.L., Q.Z., W.A.G., P.Z., and B.D. conceived the research. Z.L. and B.H. designed and performed the molecular dynamics simulations. Z.L. and X.Z. designed and performed the first-principles calculations. Z.L., G.L., Q.A., and W.A.G. co-wrote the manuscript. Data availability. All necessary data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article and its Supplementary Information files. Extra data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Code availability. Code sharing not applicable to this article, as no custom computer code or algorithm were applied during the current study. The authors declare no competing interests.

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
109878
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20210716-180805681

Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China
52022074
National Natural Science Foundation of China
51972253
National Natural Science Foundation of China
51772231
Hubei Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China
2020CFB202
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
2020III031
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
2020IB001

Dates

Created
2021-07-16
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-16
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

Caltech Custom Metadata

Other Numbering System Name
WAG
Other Numbering System Identifier
1477