The in situ time-of-flight neutron-diffraction measurements captured well the martensitic transformation behavior of the Ni-Mn-Ga ferromagnetic shape-memory alloys under uniaxial stress fields. We found that a small uniaxial stress applied during phase transformation dramatically disturbed the distribution of variants in the product phase. The observed changes in the distributions of variants may be explained by considering the role of the minimum distortion energy of the Bain transformation in the effective partition among the variants belonging to the same orientation of parent phase. It was also found that transformation kinetics under various stress fields follows the scale law. The present investigations provide the fundamental approach for scaling the evolution of microstructures in martensitic transitions, which is of general interest to the condensed matter community.

• Received 9 October 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.75.174404