This exploration demonstrates improved toughness and hardness in silicon nitride ceramics through intergrown clusters, implying potential for advanced materials.
Silicon nitride (Si₃N₄) is an excellent candidate for engineering ceramics; however, its toughness and hardness remain fundamentally constrained by the inherent limitations arising from the incompatible α-phase (characterized by high hardness) and β-phase (characterized by high toughness). Herein, we report the exploration of advanced Si₃N₄ ceramics enabled by an intergrown cluster microstructure, which achieves a synergistic enhancement in both toughness (10.2 ± 0.3 MPa·m¹/²) and Vickers hardness (20.1 ± 0.3 GPa). These synergistic properties represent the state-of-the-art among Si₃N₄ ceramics fabricated via liquid-phase sintering reported to date. It has been verified that the formation of columnar clusters is driven by a high-pressure-induced coarsening process. The established metastable growth mechanism may open an avenue for fabricating new-generation Si₃N₄ ceramics with superb performance.
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Qin et al. (2026) studied this question.
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