Yield precursor dislocation avalanches in small crystals: the irreversibility transition

Abstract

The transition from elastic to plastic deformation in crystalline metals shares history dependence and scale-invariant avalanche signature with other non-equilibrium systems under external loading: dilute colloidal suspensions, plastically-deformed amorphous solids, granular materials, and dislocation-based simulations of crystals. These other systems exhibit transitions with clear analogies to work hardening and yield stress, with many typically undergoing purely elastic behavior only after 'training' through repeated cyclic loading; studies in these other systems show a power law scaling of the hysteresis loop extent and of the training time as the peak load approaches a so-called reversible-irreversible transition (RIT). We discover here that deformation of small crystals shares these key characteristics: yielding and hysteresis in uniaxial compression experiments of single-crystalline Cu nano- and micro-pillars decay under repeated cyclic loading. The amplitude and decay time of the yield precursor avalanches diverge as the peak stress approaches failure stress for each pillar, with a power law scaling virtually equivalent to RITs in other nonequilibrium systems.

arXiv comment5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Intermittent dislocation flow in viscoplastic deformation
• The yielding transition in amorphous solids under oscillatory shear deformation
• Deformation of crystals: Connections with statistical physics
• Onset of Irreversibility in Cyclic Shear of Granular Packings
• Characterization of the material response in the granular ratcheting
• (Ir)reversibility in dense granular systems driven by oscillating forces
• Training, Memory and Universal Scaling in Amorphous Frictional Granular Matter
• Probing microplasticity in small scale FCC crystals via Dynamic Mechanical Analysis
• Geometrically-protected reversibility in hydrodynamic Loschmidt-echo experiments

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Topology of the energy landscape of sheared amorphous solids and the irreversibility transition
• Perspective on Reversible to Irreversible Transitions in Periodic Driven Many Body Systems and Future Directions For Classical and Quantum Systems