Plastic behavior of single crystals

Numerous physical mechanisms can be responsible for inelastic deformation of metals: diffusion of point defects, creation, movement and annihilation of dislocations, maculation, sliding at grain boundaries, phase transformations... The inelastic deformation corresponding to classical plasticity results, above all, from athermal mechanisms associated with the irreversible movement of dislocations (as opposed to the reversible movement at the origin of anelasticity). At the scale of a single crystal or a polycrystal grain, which is very large compared to the characteristic lengths that can be attached to dislocations, plastic flow results from the collective movement of dislocations on crystallographic sliding planes. The multiplication of dislocations during plastic deformation, and the interactions between them, govern the strain-hardening (both "isotropic" and "kinematic"), linked to the...