Correlation between structure and mechanical properties in a-quartz single crystal by nanoindentation, AFM and confocal Raman microscopy

Quartz constitutes a very useful material due to its variety of applications, highlighting solid-state physics for material science with applications for devices and sensors, as piezoelectric for microbalances or oscillators for watches, computers, etc. These applications are very sensible to local pressures and stresses, however, there is not much information in the literature about the effect of high local pressures on the structure and their correlation with mechanical properties. In order to provide more information and clarity on this type of stress-structure-mechanical properties correlation, in this work, nano indentation combined with Raman Confocal microscopy was carried out since it offers a powerful method to obtain information about the structural deformation and mechanical properties produced by high local pressures in a-quartz single crystal. The information obtained by nanoindentation (pile-up, pop-out, hardness and Young modulus) has been correlated with the structural data extracted from Raman spectroscopy, concluding that a permanent plastic deformation occurs under the indentation footprint, sharply appearing a new denser phase, which contribution increases with the applied load.& COPY; 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).