Figure 3. Cyclic stress-strain response and stress relaxation of Al and Au films:

(a) Stress-strain response of the Al-225 film over six cycles under different beam conditions. A reduction in stress can be observed for the 2^nd and 3^rd cycle with respect to the 1^st cycle. The imaging conditions for the different deformation cycles are summarized in Table 1. The green and black arrows correspond to Fig. 4 and supplementary video 2 (videoS2), respectively. (b) Beam induced stress relaxation in the Al-225 film. The film was exposed to the e-beam only at two points during each loading (indicated by arrows). At the end of the 2^nd and 3^rd cycles, the e-beam was moved to a new location, which led to significant additional relaxation (indicated by the violet cross). (c) Stress-strain response of the Al-400 film over three cycles with different beam conditions. (d) Stress-strain response of the Au film over three cycles with different beam conditions. The green arrow in (d) corresponds to supplementary video 4 (videoS4). In all the figures, the black lines correspond to fitted polynomials while the individual points indicate raw data.