Recently acoustic signature of dislocation avalanches in HCP materials was found to be long tailed in size and energy, suggesting critical dynamics. Even more recently, the intermittent plastic response was found to be generic for micro- and nano-sized systems independently of their crystallographic symmetry. These rather remarkable discoveries are reviewed in this paper in the perspective of the recent studies performed in our group. We discuss the physical origin and the scaling properties of plastic fluctuations and address the nature of their dependence on crystalline symmetry, system size, and disorder content. A particular emphasis is placed on the associated emergent behaviors, including the formation of dislocation structures, and on our ability to temper plastic fluctuations by alloying. We also discuss the "smaller is wilder" size effect that culminates in a paradoxical crack-free brittle behavior of very small, initially dislocation free crystals. We show that the implied transition between different rheological behaviors is regulated by the ratio of length scales $R=L/l$, where $L$ is the system size and $l$ is the internal length. We link this new size effect with other related phenomena like size dependence of strength ("smaller is stronger") and the size induced switch between different hardening mechanisms. One of the technological challenges in nanoscience is to tame the intermittency of plastic flow. We show that this task can be accomplished by generating tailored quenched disorder which allows one to control micro- and nano-scale forming and opens new perspectives in micro-metallurgy and structural engineering of ultra-small load-carrying elements. These results could not be achieved by conventional methods that do not explicitly consider the stochastic nature of collective dislocation dynamics.
We present a thermodynamic description of crystal plasticity. Our formulation is based on the Langer-Bouchbinder-Lookman thermodynamic dislocation theory (TDT), which asserts the fundamental importance of an effective temperature that describes the state of configurational disorder and therefore the dislocation density of the crystalline material. We extend the TDT description from isotropic plasticity to crystal plasticity with many slip systems. Finite-element simulations show favourable comparison with experiments on polycrystal fcc copper under uniaxial compression, tension, and simple she…
When far from equilibrium, many-body systems display behavior that strongly depends on the initial conditions. A characteristic such example is the phenomenon of plasticity of crystalline and amorphous materials that strongly depends on the material history. In plasticity modeling, the history is captured by a quenched, local and disordered flow stress distribution. While it is this disorder that causes avalanches that are commonly observed during nanoscale plastic deformation, the functional form and scaling properties have remained elusive. In this paper, a generic formalism is developed for…
Power law fluctuations and scale free spatial patterns are known to characterize steady state plastic flow in crystalline materials. In this Letter we study the emergence of correlations in a simple Frenkel-Kontorova (FK) type model of 2D plasticity which is largely free of arbitrariness, amenable to analytical study and is capable of generating critical exponents matching experiments. Our main observation concerns the possibility to reduce continuum plasticity to an integer valued automaton revealing inherent discreteness of the plastic flow.
West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）；National Institute of Standards and Technology（美国国家标准与技术研究院）
Digital image correlation (DIC) is a well-established, non-invasive technique for tracking and quantifying the deformation of mechanical samples under strain. While it provides an obvious way to observe incremental and aggregate displacement information, it seems likely that DIC data sets, which after all reflect the spatially-resolved response of a microstructure to loads, contain much richer information than has generally been extracted from them. In this paper, we demonstrate a machine-learning approach to quantifying the prior deformation history of a crystalline sample based on its respon…
Dislocations are the carriers of plasticity in crystalline materials. Their collective interaction behavior is dependent on the strain rate and sample size. In small specimens, details of the nucleation process are of particular importance. In the present work, discrete dislocation dynamics (DDD) simulations are performed to investigate the dominant yielding mechanisms in single crystalline copper pillars with diameters ranging from 100 to 800 nm. Based on our simulations with different strain rates and sample size, we observe a transition of the relevant nucleation mechanism from "dislocation…
We present a high-throughput nanoindentation study of in-situ bending effects on incipient plastic deformation behavior of polycrystalline and single-crystalline pure aluminum and pure copper at ultra-nano depths (<200nm). We find that hardness displays a statistically inverse dependence on in-plane stress for indentation depths smaller than 10nm, and the dependence disappears for larger indentation depths. In addition, plastic noise in the nanoindentation force and displacement displays statistically robust noise features, independently of applied stresses. Our experimental results suggest th…
The spontaneous emergence of heterogeneous dislocation patterns is a conspicuous feature of plastic deformation and strain hardening of crystalline solids. Despite long-standing efforts in the materials science and physics of defect communities, there is no general consensus regarding the physical mechanism which leads to the formation of dislocation patterns. In order to establish the fundamental mechanism, we formulate an extremely simplified, minimal model to investigate the formation of patterns based on the continuum theory of fluxes of curved dislocations. We demonstrate that strain hard…
Experiments and atomic-scale simulations suggest that the transmission of plasticity carriers in deforming amorphous-crystalline nanolaminates is mediated by the biphase interface between the amorphous and crystalline layers. In this paper, we present a micromechanics model for these biphase nanolaminates that describes defect interactions through the amorphous-crystalline interface (ACI). The model is based on an effective-temperature framework to achieve a unified description of the slow, configurational atomic rearrangements in both phases when driven out of equilibrium. We show how the sec…
We measured the low frequency (10mHz < f < 10Hz) resistance fluctuations (Noise) in single crystalline ferromagnetic Ni nanowires (diameter ~35nm) in the temperature range 80K-300K. The noise spectral power shows 1/f dependence. The nanowires in an applied magnetic field show negative magetoresistance that saturates for H <= HC. The noise spectral power shows a reduction in low applied field and becomes field independent for H >= HC. This indicates that a part of the observed 1/f noise arises from magnetic origin. The magnetic part is associated with thermally activated domain wall fluctuation…
We study the effects of long-range electrostatic interactions on the thermal fluctuations of free-standing crystalline membranes exhibiting spontaneous electric polarization directed at each point along the local normal to the surface. We show that the leading effect of dipole-dipole interactions in the long-wavelength limit consists in renormalizations of the bending rigidity and the elastic coefficients. A completely different result was obtained in the case of scalar two-point interactions decaying as $R^{-3}$, where $R$ is the distance. In the latter case, which was addressed in previous t…
Self-trapping of an electron due to its interaction with bending fluctuations in a flexible crystalline membrane is considered. Due to the dependence of the electron energy on the corrugations of the membrane, the electron can create around itself an anomalously flat (or anomalously corrugated, depending on the sign of the interaction constant) region and be confined there. Using the Feynman path integral approach, the autolocalization energy and the size of the self-trapped state (flexuron) are estimated. It is shown that typically the size of the flexuron is of the order of the wavelength of…
NOMATEN Centre of Excellence, National Centre of Nuclear Research（NOMATEN卓越中心，国家核研究中心）；Department of Applied Physics, Aalto University（阿尔托大学应用物理系）
Plastic yielding in solids strongly depends on various conditions, such as temperature and loading rate and indeed, sample-dependent knowledge of yield points in structural materials promotes reliability in mechanical behavior. Commonly, yielding is measured through controlled mechanical testing at small or large scales, in ways that either distinguish elastic (stress) from total deformation measurements, or by identifying plastic slip contributions. In this paper we argue that instead of separate elastic/plastic measurements, yielding can be unraveled through statistical analysis of total str…
Micro- or minor alloying of metallic glasses is of technological interest. An originally ductile Pd-based monolithic bulk metallic glass (Pd$_{40}$Ni$_{40}$P$_{20}$) was selectively manipulated by additions of Fe or Co. The alloying effects were extreme, showing either exceptional ductility upon Co addition or immediate catastrophic failure upon Fe addition when tested under uniaxial compression or 3-point bending. The amorphous structure was characterized prior to deformation with respect to its medium-range order (MRO) using variable resolution fluctuation electron microscopy (VR-FEM). We ob…
Nanoindentation, a common technique for probing the mechanical properties of crystalline materials, exhibits both surface and bulk-dominated responses that are linked to the parent crystal's elasticity and plasticity. For FCC crystals, the nanoindentation response is primarily controlled by the indented-grain's crystalline orientation and dislocation density. However, the indentation properties, such as hardness, have ambiguous significance at the nanoscale due to tip-specific size effects. Through extensive discrete dislocation dynamics simulations of flat-punch nanoindentation on FCC single …
We report on van der Waals epitaxial growth, materials characterization and magnetotransport experiments in crystalline nanosheets of Bismuth Telluro-Sulfide (BTS). Highly layered, good-quality crystalline nanosheets of BTS are obtained on SiO$_2$ and muscovite mica. Weak-antilocalization (WAL), electron-electron interaction-driven insulating ground state and universal conductance fluctuations are observed in magnetotransport experiments on BTS devices. Temperature, thickness and magnetic field dependence of the transport data indicate the presence of two-dimensional surface states along with …
Steady state plastic flows have been compared to developed turbulence because the two phenomena share the inherent complexity of particle trajectories, the scale free spatial patterns and the power law statistics of fluctuations. The origin of the apparently chaotic and at the same time highly correlated microscopic response in plasticity remains hidden behind conventional engineering models which are based on smooth fitting functions. To regain access to fluctuations, we study in this paper a minimal mesoscopic model whose goal is to elucidate the origin of scale free behavior in plasticity. …
Solids at incommensurate contact display low-friction, 'superlubric', sliding. For graphene flakes on a graphite surface, superlubric sliding is only temporary due to rotation of the flakes from incommensurate to commensurate contact with the substrate. We examine this rotational channel of friction in a prototype geometry of meso- and macroscopic solid lubrication. By molecular dynamics simulations and theoretical arguments we find that two surfaces lubricated by mobile, rotating graphene flakes exhibit stable superlubric sliding as for ideally incommensurate contacts also when they are cover…
