An attempt at a soliton approach to plastic flow of crystals

Abstract

In order to eliminate the discrepancy between theoretical and experimental data on the low-temperature dependence of the strain rate sensitivity in copper single crystals, a rough quantum-mechanical approach is proposed. Its general idea consists in that the dislocation kinks are discussed in terms of solitons and the steady state of plastic flow is considered as a soliton gas governed by Bose-Enstein statistics. Particularly, in order to apply this approach to the plastic flow of fcc crystals both a very simplified soliton mechanism for partial dislocation construction and a very simplified quantum-mechanical approach to the formation of the jog on the gliding dislocation are proposed. The calculations results obtained from the simple model are in quite good agreement with those obtained experimentally by Basinski.