An Overview of Plasticity in Nanoscale Composites

In the past two decades there has been great activity in the area of nanoscale composites. This has included enormous effort in the areas of epitaxial structures for microelectronics applications, organometallic systems, coatings [1], layered metallic structures and drawn in-situ composites. A great deal of progress has been made in the development of controlled fabrication methods including sputtering, electrodeposition and crystallization of amorphous structures. Also, attention has been given to the integration of ultrafine scale structures into the design of many engineering applications from high field magnets operating at cryogenic temperatures [2] to future gas turbines [3].