Silicon nanoparticles are promising new materials for photovoltaic applications that combine materials property tunability on the nanoscale with silicon’s established performance in photovoltaics. We have succeeded in synthesizing crystalline silicon nanoparticles in a continuous flow plasma reactor and established control over particle size.
Understanding crack growth behavior in complex materials is critical to material design for damage tolerance. An advancing crack, by virtue of its stress field, modifies the microstructure ahead of it including include changes in dislocation density, interfaces modification, decohesion of interfaces, void nucleation, and phase transformation . Such changes in microstructure can in turn have a
