Microstructures in low-hysteresis shape memory alloys

Experimentally, one observes that an important parameter controlling the width of the thermal hysteresis accompanying certain martensitic transformations is the compatibility of the highly symmetric austenite phase and the martensitic variants. This observation forms the basis of a theory of hysteresis that assigns an important role to the energy of the transition layer (Zhang, James, Mueller, Acta mat. 57(15):4332-4352, 2009). Following this ansatz, we study the energy barriers leading to hysteresis and analyze the optimal microstructures in the transition layers for low-hysteresis alloys.