ABSTRACT
In recent years, the nanoindentation technique has been applied not only to bulk materials such as metals, ceramics, polymers, composites, coatings, and thin films, but also to hard/soft tissues, biological materials, nanomaterials, in situ deformation and recrystallization, high-temperature nanomechanical behavior, etc. Now look into a simple trend: If we search for the keyword nanoindentation in Google Scholar, we can find there are about 52,000 entries. Now, if we restrict this search to the last ten years, the number of hits is about 22,700, which is almost 50% of the global result of 50,200. This indicates that interest regarding nanoindentation is undoubtedly increasing in recent years at a very rapid rate.
