Courtesy of Zhiwei Shan at CAMP-Nano at Xi’an Jiaotong University, China.

In-situ nano-compression of a SiO2 glass nanoparticle

A 500 nm amorphous SiO2 glass particle (top of the image) is plastically deformed into a pancake geometry in a compression test of Hysitron Picoindenter (PI95). The loading rate of 10 nm/s was generated by driving a flat diamond punch (lower left corner). Imaged with an Orius® 830 camera. Movie was captured by in-situ video software.