A technique (laser deposition of Zn/W multilayers) for producing stable nanocrystalline (nc) Zn films free of undesirable imperfections down to a grain size of d=6 nm is presented. These films exhibited grain size softening (inverse Hall–Petch effect) for d⩽11 nm, providing support that this can be a real phenomenon in nc solids. The mechanism responsible for the softening was concluded to be thermally activated grain boundary shear.
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CONRAD et al. (2002) studied this question.
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