Tuning moiré twist angles enhances tensile plasticity in bulk van der Waals crystals.

Interlayer moiré twisting in ternary bulk layered van der Waals crystals increases room-temperature macroscopic tensile ductility by up to 360%, reaching 30% tensile strain along the a-b plane.

• Why it matters: Bulk layered materials often lack effective routes to improve tensile plasticity, and moiré twisting could offer a symmetry-breaking mechanism to tune mechanical response.
• What they did: The authors introduce controllable interlayer moiré twist angles spanning commensurate ranges via simple off-axis compression in ternary bulk layered van der Waals crystals, then measure stress relaxation and tensile ductility.
• The result: Higher moiré twist angles further enhance stress relaxation and enable up to 360% higher tensile ductility, while moiré twisting occurs only between layers and negligibly affects in-plane electronic properties.

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