“…HS materials have very diverse microstructures [1], including heterogeneous lamella structure [2], gradient structure [3][4][5][6][7][8], laminate structure [9,10], dual phase CONTACT Yuntian Zhu ytzhu@ncsu.edu; Xiaolei Wu xlwu@imech.ac.cn structure [11][12][13], harmonic structure [14][15][16], bi-modal structure [17][18][19][20], metal matrix composites [21][22][23][24][25][26], etc. These apparently very diverse structures have a common feature: all of them consist of both soft domains and hard domains with dramatically different flow stresses (or strength) [1].…”