Stacking fault-mediated ultrastrong nanocrystalline Ti thin films

In this work, we prepared nanocrystalline (NC) Ti thin films with abundant stacking faults (SFs), which were created via partial dislocations emitted from grain boundaries and which were insensitive to grain sizes. By employing the nanoindentation test, we investigated the effects of SFs and grain sizes on the strength of NC Ti films at room temperature. The high density of SFs significantly strengthens NC Ti films, via dislocation-SF interactions associated with the reported highest Hall-Petch slope of ∼20 GPa  nm^1/2, to an ultrahigh strength of ∼4.4 GPa, approaching ∼50% of its ideal strength.