Extended Data Fig. 7: Strain-rate analysis.

A 5 × 5 × 20 octet sample in the [100] direction is chosen, demonstrating calculation of an approximate time-dependent strain rate from LIRAS measurements. From the time–displacement measurements (second panel), the strain is approximated by dividing by the sample height, whereas the strain rate is obtained from the time derivative of the strain–time signals (see Supplementary Information Sections III and IV). Owing to the time-dependent magnitude of the strain rate, we obtain characteristic strain rates by computing the r.m.s. strain rate for every wavelength (shown as windowed (blue)) as well as the cumulative r.m.s. strain rate over several wavelengths up to a certain point in time (shown as cumulative (red)) in the third panel. The r.m.s. strain rate over the entire signal is extracted as the primary characteristic strain rate for each experiment (dashed line in the third panel). The r.m.s. strain rates calculated over the first and last wavelengths are considered as the higher and lower strain-rate limits, respectively. The corresponding strain-rate range is thus presented as shaded regions in the fourth panel. The average of these values over the tallest five pillars/lattices (five lowest-wavenumber samples in the first panel) is taken as the characteristic strain rate and its limits for that structure. We selected this single value of r.m.s. strain rate to be representative for LIRAS experiments on each structure.