Tunable plasticity in amorphous silicon carbide films.

Plasticity plays a crucial role in the mechanical behavior of engineering materials. For instance, energy dissipation during plastic deformation is vital to the sufficient fracture resistance of engineering materials. Thus, the lack of plasticity in brittle hybrid organic-inorganic glasses (hybrid glasses) often results in a low fracture resistance and has been a significant challenge for their integration and applications. Here, we demonstrate that hydrogenated amorphous silicon carbide films, a class of hybrid glasses, can exhibit a plasticity that is even tunable by controlling their molecular structure and thereby leads to an increased and adjustable fracture resistance in the films. We decouple the plasticity contribution from the fracture resistance of the films by estimating the "work-of-fracture" using a mean-field approach, which provides some insight into a potential connection between the onset of plasticity in the films and the well-known rigidity percolation threshold.