Mechanism transition and strong temperature dependence of dislocation nucleation from grain boundaries: An accelerated molecular dynamics study

Accelerated molecular dynamics reveals a mechanism transition and strong temperature dependence of dislocation nucleation from grain boundaries (GBs) in Cu. At stress levels up to similar to 90% of the ideal dislocationnucleation stress, atomic shuffling at the E structural unit in a GB acts as a precursor to dislocation nucleation, and eventually a single dislocation is nucleated. At very high stress levels near the ideal dislocation-nucleation stress, a multiple dislocation is collectively nucleated. In these processes, the activation free energy and activation volume depend strongly on temperature. The strain-rate dependence of the critical nucleation stress is studied and the result shows that the mechanism transition from the shuffling-assisted dislocation-nucleation mechanism to the collective dislocation-nucleationmechanism occurs during the strain rate increasing from 10(-4) s(-1) to 10(10) s(-1).