Nanoindentation characterizes mechanical behavior in layered materials

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Henry Quansah Afful, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign about a general framework for understanding how layered materials respond to stress. Afful is interested in the threshold conditions where the material goes from plastic deformation to fracture. Using nanoindentation, his group could learn, at the atomic scale, when plastic deformation starts and how various temperatures affect the mechanical behavior of layered materials. This work was published in a recent issue of Communications Materials.