Nanoscale deformation of crystalline metals: Experiments and simulations

•The fundamental physical process and the size effect of nanoscale deformation flow of metals is revealed by MD simulation.•A revised phenomenological model for dislocation movement dominated creep model during nanomolding is developed, which agrees with the MD simulation results.•A new high-efficiency technique to investigate the size dependent plastic deformation of metals at room temperature is proposed, which validates the dislocation nucleation based phenomenological model.•Three deformation modes are uncovered in the flow of metals in a nanocavity, that is, the viscous flow, the burst growth and the continuous growth modes, based on which a new deformation map is proposed. In the present work, we performed experiments and molecular dynamic simulations to study the atomic physical process and deformation mechanism involved in nanoscale deformation of crystalline metals. By contact deforming bulk metals using hard molds with different cavity sizes at various temperatures and different stress levels, the flow of metals (e.g., Au and Ag) into nanocavities is quantified by the aspect ratio of molded micro-/nanorods, based on which the dependence of deformability on cavity size, temperature and stress is revealed. It is found that the critical forming pressure is determined by the entering barrier. Once the entering barrier can be overcome, quantified by the aspect ratio of metal nanorods, the molding efficiency increases with the cavity size decreasing. Moreover, three deformation modes are uncovered in the nanoscale plastic flow of metals and directly related with the atomic physical processes, i.e. atomic diffusion, dislocation nucleation, multiplication and movement. In the dislocation dominated temperature regime, a transition of deformation mode from burst growth to continuous growth is observed as the cavity size increases. When the mold cavity size is very small (100-101 nm), the metal atoms flowing in a mold cavity will arrange amorphously even at low temperature, which usually only occurs at high temperature for large cavity sizes. Therefore, reducing the size shows the same effect as increasing the temperature, making nanomolding easier.