3. Structural developments

Early developments in dislocation theory and transmission electron microscopy, which enables crystalline defects to be visualized directly, had raised hopes that it would soon be possible to link empirical laws of macroscopic behavior to microscopic mechanisms. However, despite recent progress in numerical simulations, there is as yet no complete, coherent theory that can interpret empirical laws of macroscopic behavior from microscopic data ("micro-macro transition"). It is nevertheless possible to predict the orders of magnitude and qualitative variations involved in a few elementary mechanisms, which will be the subject of this paragraph. We shall confine ourselves here to the case of pure metals, leaving...