Grain boundary diffusion in a Peierls–Nabarro potential

Abstract

We investigate the diffusion of a grain boundary in a crystalline material. We consider inparticular the case of a regularly spaced low-angle grain boundary schematized as an arrayof dislocations that interact with each other through long-range stress fields and with thecrystalline Peierls–Nabarro potential. The methodology employed to analyze thedynamics of the center of mass of the grain boundary and its spatio-temporalfluctuations is based on overdamped Langevin equations. The generality and theefficiency of this technique is proved by the agreement with molecular dynamicssimulations.