Our topic is a continuation of the May 15 discussion led by Professor Julia Greer on “Experimental Mechanics at Nano-scale”.  The whole story about the “micro-pillars” started in 2004, when Mike Uchic et al. used focused ion beams (FIB) to make micro-pillars from pure Ni and Ni alloys that can then be uni-axially compressed by a flattened AFM tip [Science 305, 986-989, 2004].  The flow stress is found to increase with decreasing sample diameter even though there is no imposed strain gradient as in micro-indentation, bending or torsion experiments.  This finding generated a lot of excitement worldwide. 

The lecture notes of the two courses I taught at Stanford University during the last two quarters, "ME 340 Elasticity" and "ME 334 Introduction to Statistical Mechanics", are available in PDF format online at:

  http://micro.stanford.edu/~caiwei/me340/

  http://micro.stanford.edu/~caiwei/me334/

Perhaps it could be useful to you.

We are pleased to announce Dislocations 2008, an international conference on the fundamentals of plastic deformation and other physical phenomena where the dislocations play pivotal roles.  The conference will take place on October 13-17, 2008 at the Gold Coast Hotel, Hong Kong, China.  More information about the Dislocations 2008 conference can be found at the following web site:

Postdoctoral positions are available in the Micro and Nano Mechanics group led by Prof. Wei Cai in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford University.  [Link]

The group’s research focuses on fundamental mechanisms of material deformation at the micro and nano scales by means of computer simulations and theoretical modeling of imperfections in solids. For example, we are currently investigating deformation behavior of metal micro pillars and semiconductor nano wires using Dislocation Dynamics (mesoscopic) and Molecular Dynamics (atomistic) simulations.

Companion web site http://micro.stanford.edu ISBN:0-19-852614-8, Hard cover, 304 pages, Nov. 2006, US $74.50.

This book presents a broad collection of models and computational methods - from atomistic to continuum - applied to crystal dislocations. Its purpose is to help students and researchers in computational materials sciences to acquire practical knowledge of relevant simulation methods. Because their behavior spans multiple length and time scales, crystal dislocations present a common ground for an in-depth discussion of a variety of computational approaches, including their relative strengths, weaknesses and inter-connections. The details of the covered methods are presented in the form of "numerical recipes" and illustrated by case studies. A suite of simulation codes and data files is made available on the book's website to help the reader "to learn-by-doing" through solving the exercise problems offered in the book. This book is part of an Oxford Series on Materials Modelling.