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Abstract The discovery of long-range magnetic ordering in atomically thin materials catapulted the van der Waals (vdW) family of compounds into an unprecedented popularity, leading to potentially important technological applications in magnetic storage and magneto-transport devices, as well as photoelectric sensors. With the potential for the use of vdW materials in space exploration technologies it is critical to understand how the properties of such materials are affected by ionizing proton irradiation. Owing to their robust intra-layer stability and sensitivity to external perturbations, these materials also provide excellent opportunities for studying proton irradiation as a non-destructive tool for controlling their magnetic properties. Specifically, the exfoliable Cr₂Si₂Te₆(CST) is a ferromagnetic semiconductor with the Curie temperature (T_C) of ∼32 K. Here, we have investigated the magnetic properties of CST upon proton irradiation as a function of fluence (1 × 10¹⁵, 5 × 10¹⁵, 1 × 10¹⁶, 5 × 10¹⁶, and 1 × 10¹⁸H⁺/cm⁻²) by employing variable-temperature, variable-field magnetization measurements, and detail how the magnetization, magnetic anisotropy vary as a function of proton fluence across the magnetic phase transition. While theT_Cremains constant as a function of proton fluence, we observed that the saturation magnetization and magnetic anisotropy diverge at the proton fluence of 5 × 10¹⁶H⁺/cm⁻², which is prominent in the ferromagnetic phase, in particular.This work demonstrates that proton irradiation is a feasible method for modifying the magnetic properties and local magnetic interactions of vdWs crystals, which represents a significant step forward in the design of future spintronic and magneto-electronic applications. 

Crystalline metals generally exhibit good deformability but low strength and poor irradiation tolerance. Amorphous materials in general display poor deformability but high strength and good irradiation tolerance. Interestingly, refining characteristic size can enhance the flow strength of crystalline metals and the deformability of amorphous materials. Thus, crystalline–amorphous nanostructures can exhibit an enhanced strength and an improved plastic flow stability. In addition, high-density interfaces can trap radiation-induced defects and accommodate free volume fluctuation. In this article, we review crystalline–amorphous nanocomposites with characteristic microstructures including nanolaminates, core–shell microstructures, and crystalline/amorphous-based dual-phase nanocomposites. The focus is put on synthesis of characteristic microstructures, deformation behaviors, and multiscale materials modelling. 

Emerging applications like a drone and an autonomous vehicle require system-on-a-chips (SoCs) with high reliability, e.g., the mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) needs to be over tens of thousands of hours [1]. Meanwhile, as these applications require increasingly higher performance and energy efficiency, a multi-core architecture is often desirable. Here, each core operates in an independent voltage/frequency (V/F) domain, ideally from the near-threshold voltage (NTV) to super-threshold, while communicating with one another via a network-on-chip (NoC) [2]. However, this makes it challenging to ensure robustness in clock domain crossing against metastability. Metastability becomes even more critical to NTV circuits since metastability resolution time constant T grows super-linearly with voltage scaling [3]. Conventionally, an NoC uses multi-stage (4 stages in [4]) synchronizers to improve MTBF, but they increase latency and cannot completely eliminate metastability. Recently, [5] proposed a novel NTV flip-flop, which has a lower probability of having metastability. Another recent work [6] proposed to detect the necessary condition of metastability and mitigate it by modulating the RX clock and also requesting retransmission to guarantee data correctness. However, as it detects a necessary condition, not actual metastability, it tends to overly request retransmission, hurting latency, throughput, and energy efficiency. 

Autonomous assembly is a crucial capability for robots in many applications. For this task, several problems such as obstacle avoidance, motion planning, and actuator control have been extensively studied in robotics. However, when it comes to task specification, the space of possibilities remains underexplored. Towards this end, we introduce a novel problem, single-image-guided 3D part assembly, along with a learning-based solution. We study this problem in the setting of furniture assembly from a given complete set of parts and a single image depicting the entire assembled object. Multiple challenges exist in this setting, including handling ambiguity among parts (e.g., slats in a chair back and leg stretchers) and 3D pose prediction for parts and part subassemblies, whether visible or occluded. We address these issues by proposing a two-module pipeline that leverages strong 2D-3D correspondences and assembly-oriented graph message-passing to infer part relationships. In experiments with a PartNet-based synthetic benchmark, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework as compared with three baseline approaches (code and data available at https://github.com/AntheaLi/3DPartAssembly). 

In this contribution, we use heavy ion irradiation and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy to demonstrate that defects can be used to tailor the optical properties of two-dimensional molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2 ). Sonicated MoS 2 flakes were deposited onto Si/SiO 2 substrate and subjected to 3 MeV Au 2+ ion irradiation at room temperature to fluences ranging from 1 × 10 12 to 1 × 10 16 cm −2 . We demonstrate that irradiation-induced defects can control optical excitations in the inner core shell of MoS 2 by binding A 1s - and B 1s -excitons, and correlate the exciton peaks to the specific defects introduced with irradiation. The systematic increase of ion fluence produced different defect densities in MoS 2 , which were estimated using B/A exciton ratios and progressively increased with ion fluence. We show that up to the fluences of 1 × 10 14 cm −2 , the MoS 2 lattice remains crystalline and defect densities can be controlled, whereas at higher fluences (≥1 × 10 15 cm −2 ), the large number of introduced defects distorts the excitonic structure of the material. In addition to controlling excitons, defects were used to split bound and free trions, and we demonstrate that at higher fluences (1 × 10 15 cm −2 ), both free and bound trions can be observed in the same PL spectrum. Most importantly, the lifetimes of these states exceed trion and exciton lifetimes in pristine MoS 2 , and PL spectra of irradiated MoS 2 remains unchanged weeks after irradiation experiments. Thus, this work demonstrated the feasibility of engineering novel optical behaviors in low-dimensional materials using heavy ion irradiation. The insights gained from this study will aid in understanding the many-body interactions in low-dimensional materials and may ultimately be used to develop novel materials for optoelectronic applications. 

As one candidate alloy for future Generation IV and fusion reactors, a dual-phase 12Cr oxide-dispersion-strengthened (ODS) alloy was developed for high temperature strength and creep resistance and has shown good void swelling resistance under high damage self-ion irradiation at high temperature. However, the effect of helium and its combination with radiation damage on oxide dispersoid stability needs to be investigated. In this study, 120 keV energy helium was preloaded into specimens at doses of 1 × 1015 and 1 × 1016 ions/cm2 at room temperature, and 3.5 MeV Fe self-ions were sequentially implanted to reach 100 peak displacement-per-atom at 475 °C. He implantation alone in the control sample did not affect the dispersoid morphology. After Fe ion irradiation, a dramatic increase in density of coherent oxide dispersoids was observed at low He dose, but no such increase was observed at high He dose. The study suggests that helium bubbles act as sinks for nucleation of coherent oxide dispersoids, but dispersoid growth may become difficult if too many sinks are introduced, suggesting that a critical mass of trapping is required for stable dispersoid growth. 

We studied the effects of internal free surfaces on the evolution of ion-induced void swelling in pure iron. The study was initially driven by the motivation to introduce a planar free-surface defect sink at depths that would remove the injected interstitial effect from ion irradiation, possibly enhancing swelling. Using the focused ion beam technique, deep trenches were created on a cross section of pure iron at various depths, so as to create bridges of thickness ranging from 0.88 μm to 1.70 μm. Samples were then irradiated with 3.5 MeV Fe2+ ions at 475 °C to a fluence corresponding to a peak displacement per atom dose of 150 dpa. The projected range of 3.5 MeV Fe2+ ions is about 1.2 μm so the chosen bridge thicknesses involved fractions of the ion range, thicknesses comparable to the mean ion range (peak of injected interstitial distribution), and thicknesses beyond the full range. It was found that introduction of such surfaces did not enhance swelling but actually decreased it, primarily because there were now two denuded zones with a combined stronger influence than that of the injected interstitial. The study suggests that such strong surface effects must be considered for ion irradiation studies of thin films or bridge-like structures.