Investigation of Viscoelastic Properties of Amorphous Selenium near Glass Transition Using Depth‐Sensing Indentation

Abstract

New procedures involving depth‐sensing indentation are used to measure the submicron scale elastic modulus, hardness, viscosity, and activation energy and volume for creep of amorphous selenium below glass transition. The accurate measurement of Young's modulus in a highly viscoelastic situation using depth‐sensing indentation remains a challenge, and a creep correction procedure is employed here to measure the modulus. The measured Young's modulus exhibits a strong decreasing trend from ∼10 GPa to 4.4 GPa as temperature increases from ∼302 K to 309 K, in reasonably good agreement with bulk behavior. Two new procedures are also proposed here to measure the viscosity. The measured shear viscosity decreases from ∼1×1012 Pa‐s to ∼2×1010 Pa‐s when the temperature increases over the same range, and the variation with temperature is found to obey an Arrehnius rate equation. The activation energy for the viscous creep process is found to be ∼463 kJ/mol. Both the viscosity and the activation energy are lower than the bulk values, and this is thought to be due to the much higher stress levels of over 200 MPa involved in the nanoindentation experiments here. The apparent activation volume exhibits a rising trend from 1.04×10−31 to 2.35×10−30 m3 over the same temperature range.