Size-Dependent Plasticity of Single Crystalline Metallic Nanostructures

“Size-dependent plasticity” here refers to the strength of metallic samples being a strong function of their size when their dimensions are reduced to the micron and below scales. The notion of reduced sample size applies to all three dimensions, i.e., stand-alone, or one-dimensional (1D) nano and microstructures rather than thin films (2D), where only their thicknesses are reduced to nano- and micro-scales, or to the small-scale deformation volumes within a bulk matrix (3D) as would be the case during nanoindentation experiments, for example.