查看文章

Refining grains to nanoscale has been a challenge, especially for materials with low-melting points and poor ductility, such as Mg alloys. Here we report a novel mechanism of nanocrystallization assisted by solute segregation, by which a nanocrystalline Mg-Ag alloy was produced by moderate cold rolling (∼55% strain) followed by low-temperature annealing. Specifically, during cold rolling non-basal <c + a> dislocations were activated to form dislocation cells walls, which were pinned by Ag segregation, and transformed into boundaries of nanocrystalline grains during annealing.