Fluctuations in crystalline plasticity

Recently acoustic signature of dislocation avalanches in HCP materials was found to be long tailed in size and energy, suggesting critical dynamics. Moreover, 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 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 argue that the implied transition between different rheological behaviors is regulated by the ratio of length scales <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>R</mml:mi> <mml:mo>=</mml:mo> <mml:mi>L</mml:mi> <mml:mo>/</mml:mo> <mml:mi>l</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> , where <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>L</mml:mi> </mml:math> is the system size and <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>l</mml:mi> </mml:math> is the internal length. We link this size effect with size dependence of strength (“smaller is stronger”) and the size-induced switch between different hardening mechanisms. We show that the task of taming the intermittency of plastic flow at ultra-small scales can be accomplished by generating tailored quenched disorder which allows one to control micro- and nano-forming and opens new perspectives in micro-metallurgy and structural engineering of miniature load-carrying elements. These insights were beyond the reach of conventional theoretical approaches that do not explicitly account for the stochastic nature of collective dislocation dynamics.