2025/04/23 by Himanshu Joshi, Joshi, Himanshu, Ian Chesser +5
Materials Science · #FOS: Physical sciences #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Microstructure and mechanical properties
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2504.16854
openalex publication_date 2025/04/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
GBs evolve by the nucleation and glide of disconnections, which are dislocations with a step character. In this work, motivated by recent success in predicting GB properties such as the shear coupling factor and mobility from the intrinsic properties of disconnections, we develop a systematic method to calculate the energy barriers for the nucleation and glide of individual disconnection modes under arbitrary driving forces. This method combines tools from bicrystallography to enumerate disconnection modes and the NEB method to calculate their energetics, yielding minimum energy paths and atomistic mechanisms for the nucleation and glide of each disconnection mode. We apply the method to accurately predict shear coupling factors of [001] symmetric tilt grain boundaries in Cu. Particular attention is paid to the boundaries where the classical disconnection nucleation model produces incorrect nucleation barriers. We demonstrate that the method can accurately compute the energy barriers and predict the shear coupling factors for low temperature regime.