• Journal of the Korean Ceramic Society
• /
• v.34 no.2
• /
• pp.171-174
• /
• 1997

It was experimentally identified, for the first time, that oxygen phonons play an important role in the low temperature degradation(tetragonallongrightarrowmonoclinic phase transformation) of yttria stabilized tetragonal zir-conia polycrystals (Y-TZP). The degradation accompanied by immersing the samples in the boiling water were markedly reduced by substituting of 18O for 16O in Y-TZP. This was attributed to the heavier mass of 18O which leads to the smaller probability to find oxygen atoms beyond certain critical displacements.