The preparation and the mechanism study of bulk pure rare-earth metals with amorphous and nanocrystalline structures, which were produced by spark plasma sintering (SPS), were carried out in this paper. With different processing parameters, the amorphous, two phases of amorphous and nanocrystalline, and complete nanocrystalline microstructures have been obtained. The nano-grain sizes in the bulk nanocrystalline materials are found smaller than the original powder particles sizes, which may change the conventional viewpoint that the grains in the sintered bulk are generally coarser than the raw powder particles. The technique developed in the present work can be extended to the preparation of many other nano bulk metal materials, and thus enables the studies of the nano-size effects on the physical, chemical and mechanical properties of bulk nano materials.
