The optical second-harmonic generation from a thin crystalline film on a substrate is theoretically investigated for both s and p polarized incident light. The contributions of lattice misfit strain as well as of misfit dislocation strain to the second-order nonlinear optical susceptibility are described using a nonlinear photoelastic tensor and can be separated by a polarization analysis of th...

Shear banding is a ubiquitous phenomenon of severe plastic deformation, and damage accumulation in shear bands often results in the catastrophic failure of a material. Despite extensive studies, the microscopic mechanisms of strain localization and deformation damage in shear bands remain elusive due to their spatial-temporal complexities embedded in bulk materials. Here we conducted synchrotro...

Small icosahedral, decahedral, and fcc structures have been studied by unbiased global optimization methods or Wulff construction and Northby lattice methods. Strain-free close-packed structures are not much discussed because the structures are very difficult to optimize and there is no common strain-free close-packed lattice. We propose a new strategy to construct such a lattice containing all...

Lattice strain is generated in crystal structures as a result of atomic size differences between host atom and solute elements during substitutional alloying. Extensive work has been performed to study lattice parameter variation with alloying elements, primarily using diffraction methods. The global information provided by reciprocal space analysis, however, limits access to local structural d...

We report simulation evidence that the structure of the first water layer next to the surface can strongly affect the contact angle of water droplets. Molecular dynamics simulations show that a small uniform strain (± 3%) applied to the lattice constant of a multilayer hydrophilic surface can introduce a marked change in the wetting tendency. In particular, when the lattice constant of a hydrop...