In this work, micropillar compression testing has been used to obtain stress-strain curves for sputter-deposited Cu–Nb nanolaminate composites with nominal bilayer thickness of 10nm. In addition to the extremely high flow strength of 2.4GPa, the 5nm Cu∕5nm Nb nanolaminate exhibits significant ductility, in excess of 25% true strain.

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Atomistic modeling shows that Cu-Nb and Cu-V interfaces contain high excess atomic volume due to constitutional vacancy concentrations of ~5%at. and ~0.8%at., respectively. This finding is supported by experiments demonstrating that a ~5-fold higher He concentration is required to observe He bubbles via throughfocus transmission electron microscopy at Cu-Nb interfaces than in Cu-V interfaces.Interfaces with structures tailored to minimize precipitation and growth of He bubbles may be used to design damage-resistant composites for fusion reactors.Unlike pure metals 1 , some materials contain constitutional vacancies that are thermodynamically stable at arbitrarily low temperature, for example grain boundaries (GBs) in ceramics 2 and semiconductors 3 , compounds with wide phase fields like NiAl 4 , and certain metal hydrides 5 . We use atomistic modeling to show that Cu-Nb and Cu-V interfaces contain high constitutional vacancy concentrations.Indirect experimental verification of this prediction is obtained by measuring the critical He concentration at which bubbles become detectable at these interfaces in transmission electron microscopy (TEM).

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Recent studies have shown that two-phase nanocomposite materials with semicoherent interfaces exhibit enhanced strength, deformability, and radiation damage resistance. The remarkable behavior exhibited by these materials has been attributed to the atomistic structure of the bimetal interface that results in interfaces with low shear strength and hence, strong barriers for slip transmission due to dislocation core spreading along the weak interfaces. In this work, the low interfacial shear strength of Cu/Nb nanoscale multilayers dictates a new mechanism for shear banding and strain softening during micropillar compression. Our findings, supported by molecular dynamics simulations, provide insight on the design of nanocomposites with tailored interface structures and geometry to obtain a combination of high strength and deformability. High strength is derived from the ability of the interfaces to trap dislocations through relative ease of interfacial shear, while deformability can be maximized by controlling the effects of loading geometry on shear band formation.

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