ferroelastic; nucleation

I am happy to share our newest open access article which is just published in Scripta Materialia. For the first time, the mechanism of domain nucleation during ferroelastic domain switching is revealed by utilizing phase-field simulations. Due to relaxation of strain energy, the coherent domain walls of the surviving domains often form features like steps, crevices and corners, and nucleation of new domains primarily takes place at these sites in a repeated fashion. Our work described the mechanism of ferroelastic domain switching to be independent of the domain wall energy.