ESMC 2025 conference in Lyon

This year’s European Solid Mechanics Conference (ESMC 2025) took place in Lyon, attracting more than 1,300 researchers from around the globe. Among the many specialized symposia, the micromechanical testing session stood out with high attendance and strong scientific engagement. We were proud to contribute to the program and would like to sincerely thank the session organizers - Profs. G. Dehm, G. Kermouche, and J. Molina - for putting together an excellent and inspiring forum for exchange.

Prof. B. Merle presented the latest results from the PhD thesis of Anna Krapf, which explored the fatigue behavior of freestanding 150 nm gold thin films. This work is part of the DFG-funded DACH project "FATIFACE", carried out in collaboration with Prof. Megan Cordill from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Leoben. We gratefully acknowledge the DFG for supporting this research.

The study revealed that the fatigue behavior of these ultrathin films is dominated by creep mechanisms, even at room temperature. Through systematic experimentation, we developed mechanism maps that illustrate the transitions in fatigue behavior as a function of stress amplitude and temperature across different microstructures. A key result was the identification of a fatigue limit in nanocrystalline films—a crucial insight for the design of reliable metallic thin films in flexible electronics and microdevices.

Further details are available in our recent publication:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.msea.2025.1486868686