Room temperature nanoindentation creep of nanoscale Ag/Fe multilayers

This paper deals with room temperature indentation creep behavior of nanoscale Ag/Fe multilayers. The constant-load nanoindentation test results reveal that all the multilayers exhibit steady-state creep after transient creep occurring at first 150 s and decreasing periodicity leads to a decrease in the stress exponent and an increase in creep rate. The dependence of the stress exponent and creep rate on the periodicity indicates that the creep process is dominated by dislocation glide–climb mechanism and the increasing fraction of grain boundaries and interfaces provide effective diffusion paths for the creep climb that determines the whole creep rate.