The non-Hookian behavior of chalcogenide glasses under irradiation: A nanoindentation study

The combination of nanoindentation and band-gap irradiation has been used to study the photoplastic effect in vitreous semiconductors. It has been shown that a non-linear (non-Hookian) mechanism of the formation of the strain response is realized in the As–Se chalcogenide films subjected to the combined action of light and external mechanical loading, simultaneously with opposite changes in Young’s modulus and nanohardness. These observations have been considered in the frame of the two-phase model of glasses in which each of the phases has a time-dependent character of the mechanical response subjected to an external perturbation. We have confirmed this assumption by experiment with irradiation of the film surface by linearly polarized light and give a simple mechanical model for explanations of the obtained results.