Atomistic mechanisms of intermittent plasticity in metals: dislocation avalanches and defect cluster pinning

Variety of scaling behaviors in nanocrystalline plasticity

We address the question of why larger, high-symmetry crystals are mostly weak, ductile, and statistically subcritical, while smaller crystals with the same symmetry are strong, brittle and supercritical. We link it to another question of why intermittent elasto-plastic deformation of submicron crystals features highly unusual size sensitivity of scaling exponents. We use a minimal integer-valued automaton model of crystal plasticity to show that with growing variance of quenched disorder, which can serve in this case as a proxy for increasing size, submicron crystals undergo a crossover from spin-glass marginality to criticality characterizing the second order brittle-to-ductile (BD) transition. We argue that this crossover is behind the nonuniversality of scaling exponents observed in physical and numerical experiments. The nonuniversality emerges only if the quenched disorder is elastically incompatible, and it disappears if the disorder is compatible.

Rotatable precipitates change the scale-free to scale dependent statistics in compressed Ti nano-pillars

Compressed nano-pillars crackle from moving dislocations, which reduces plastic stability. Crackling noise is characterized by stress drops or strain bursts, which scale over a large region of sizes leading to power law statistics. Here we report that this “classic” behaviour is not valid in Ti-based nanopillars for a counterintuitive reason: we tailor precipitates inside the nano-pillar, which “regulate” the flux of dislocations. It is not because the nano-pillars become too small to sustain large dislocation movements, the effect is hence independent of size. Our precipitates act as “rotors”: local stress initiates the rotation of inclusions, which reduces the stress amplitudes dramatically. The size distribution of stress drops simultaneously changes from power law to exponential. Rotors act like revolving doors limiting the number of passing dislocations. Hence each collapse becomes weak. We present experimental evidence for Ti-based nano-pillars (diameters between 300 nm and 2 μm) with power law distributions of crackling noise P(s) ∼ s^−τ with τ ∼ 2 in the defect free or non-rotatable precipitate states. Rotors change the size distribution to P(s) ∼ exp(−s/s₀). Rotors are inclusions of ω-phase that aligns under stress along slip planes and limit dislocation glide to small distances with high nucleation rates. This opens new ways to make nano-pillars more stable.

Temporal analysis of acoustic emission from a plunged granular bed

The statistical property of acoustic emission (AE) events from a plunged granular bed is analyzed by means of actual-time and natural-time analyses. These temporal analysis methods allow us to investigate the details of AE events that follow a power-law distribution. In the actual-time analysis, the calm-time distribution, and the decay of the event-occurrence density after the largest event (i.e., the Omori-Utsu law) are measured. Although the former always shows a power-law form, the latter does not always obey a power law. Markovianity of the event-occurrence process is also verified using a scaling law by assuming that both of them exhibit power laws. We find that the effective shear strain rate is a key parameter to classify the emergence rate of power-law nature and Markovianity in granular AE events. For the natural-time analysis, the existence of self-organized critical states is revealed by calculating the variance of natural time χ(k), where kth natural time of N events is defined as χ(k)=k/N. In addition, the energy difference distribution can be fitted by a q-Gaussian form, which is also consistent with the criticality of the system.