This paper presents a study of the microstructure and mechanical properties of commercial high-hardness armor (HHA) steels tempered at different temperatures. Although the as-received specimens of all the steels exhibit a tempered martensite structure with lath type morphology, the A steel, which has the smallest carbon content, had the lowest hardness due to reduced solid solution hardening and larger lath thickness, irrespective of tempering conditions. As the tempering temperature increases, the hardness of the steels steadily decreases because dislocation density decreases and the lath thickness of martensite increases due to recovery and over-aging effects. When the variations in hardness plotted as a function of tempering temperature are compared with the hardness of the as-received specimens, it seems that the B steel, which has the highest yield and tensile strengths, is fabricated by quenching, while the other steels are fabricated by quenching and tempering. On the other hand, the impact properties of the steels are affected by specimen orientation and test temperature as well as microstructure. Based on these results, the effect of tempering on the microstructure and mechanical properties of commercial high-hardness armor steels is discussed.

The magneto-transport properties of an individual single crystalline Bi nanowire grown by aspontaneous growth method are reported. A four-terminal device based on an individual 400-nm-diameternanowire was successfully fabricated using a plasma etching technique that removed an oxide layer that hadformed on the surface of the nanowire. Large transverse ordinary magnetoresistance (1401%) and negativelongitudinal ordinary magnetoresistance (−38%) were measured at 2K. It was observed that the period ofShubnikov-de Haas oscillations in transverse geometry was 0.074T−1, 0.16T−1 and 0.77T−1, which is in goodagreement with those of bulk Bi. However, it was found that the period of SdH oscillation in longitudinalgeometry is 0.24T−1, which is larger than the value of 0.16T−1 reported for bulk Bi. The deviation is attributableto the spatial confinement arising from scattering at the nanowire surface boundary.