With their resistance to high temperatures and corrosion, ceramics are essential materials for bearings, nozzles, valves, and other industrial components. Yet their applications remain limited by some of their mechanical properties. Ceramics tend to be brittle, with low tolerance for strain. A ceramic with the strength and deformability of metals could be fabricated into, for instance, shock absorbers or buffers in high-temperature environments. Now researchers at Yanshan University in China report in Nature the synthesis of an unusually flexible ceramic material: twist-stacked boron nitride (TS-BN). It has a compressive strain that is an order of magnitude above that of conventional ceramics.
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