Professor Oh Sang-ho’s research team from SKKU’s Department of Energy Science (DOES) worked hand in hand alongside Prof. Lee Su-bin’s team from the Center for Integrated Nanostructure Physics (CINAP) of the Institute of Basic Science (IBS), and the collaboration has led to a novel discovery. The researchers were able to observe, on a nanometer scale, what happens when plastic deformation is initiated. This was done by placing gold nanowires under a transmission electron microscope (TEM) and applying the process of nanoindentation onto the wires to stimulate plasticity. The initiation of plastic deformation would signal the in-situ observation, and the team was able to record the phenomenon at 25 frames per second. The photographs captured scenes of microscopic bursts that occur within small fractions of a second, and these bursts are presented in the form of prismatic dislocation loops (PDLs) which soon transition to take the shape of open half-loops, then into helical dislocations — a shape that can be likened to a metal spring. This accomplishment is a positive step towards understanding the intrinsic nature of materials and raises expectations for many fields in the future, such as the engineering of semiconductors. These results were published in Nature Communications, an open access scientific journal, on May 12thth.