Related papers: Mild-to-wild plasticity of Earth's upper mantle
Rock and ice are ubiquitous geologic materials. While apparently solid, they also exhibit fluid behavior under stress - a property termed viscoelasticity. Viscoelastic convection of Earth's mantle drives tectonic plate motion with…
Ice plasticity has been thoroughly studied, owing to its importance in glaciers and ice sheets dynamics. In particular, its anisotropy (easy basal slip) has been suspected for a long time, then fully characterized 40 years ago. More…
Topography on a wet rocky exoplanet could raise land above its sea level. Although land elevation is the product of many complex processes, the large-scale topographic features on any geodynamically-active planet are the expression of the…
The existence of a well defined yield stress, where a macroscopic piece of crystal begins to plastically flow, has been one of the basic observations of materials science. In contrast to macroscopic samples, in micro- and nanocrystals the…
Changes in stress applied to mantle rocks, such as those imposed by earthquakes, induce a period of evolution in viscosity and microstructure. This transient creep is often modelled based on stress transfer among slip systems due to grain…
A variety of complex fluids consist in soft, round objects (foams, emulsions, assemblies of copolymer micelles or of multilamellar vesicles -- also known as onions). Their dense packing induces a slight deviation from their prefered…
Nanoindentation techniques recently developed to measure the mechanical response of crystals under external loading conditions reveal new phenomena upon decreasing sample size below the microscale. At small length scales, material…
Crystal plasticity is mediated through dislocations, which form knotted configurations in a complex energy landscape. Once they disentangle and move, they may also be impeded by permanent obstacles with finite energy barriers or frustrating…
The oceanic mantle lithosphere has considerable potential to store chemically bound water, thereby being an important factor for the deep water cycle. However, the actual extent of hydrous alteration in such mantle rocks is debated.…
The strength of the lithosphere is typically modelled based on constitutive equations for steady-state flow. However, models of lithospheric flexure reveal differences in lithospheric strength that are difficult to reconcile based on such…
Olivine comprises approximately 70 $\%$ by volume of the Earth's upper mantle, making it likely that it controls the mechanical, electrical and seismic properties of the upper mantle. All rocks are composed of crystals separated by grain…
Melting is omnipresent in nature and technology, with applications ranging from metallurgy, biology, food science, and latent thermal energy storage to oceanography, geophysics, and climate science, and occurring on all scales from…
Recently acoustic signature of dislocation avalanches in HCP materials was found to be long tailed in size and energy, suggesting critical dynamics. Even more recently, the intermittent plastic response was found to be generic for micro-…
A correlation is established between the macro-scale friction regimes of metals and a transition between two dominant atomistic mechanisms of deformation. Metals tend to exhibit bi-stable friction behavior -- low and converging or high and…
Prior to macroscopic yielding, most materials undergo a regime of plastic activity that cannot be resolved in conventional bulk deformation experiments. In this pre-yield, or micro-plastic regime, it is the initial three dimensional defect…
Graphene is well known for its extraordinary mechanical properties combining brittleness and ductility. While most mechanical studies of graphene focused on the strength and brittle fracture behavior, its ductility, plastic deformation, and…
A polycrystalline solid is modelled as an ensemble of random irregular polyhedra filling the entire space occupied by the solid body, leaving no voids or flaws between them. Adjacent grains can slide with a relative velocity proportional to…
Mechanical deformation of amorphous solids can be described as consisting of an elastic part in which the stress increases linearly with strain, up to a yield point at which the solid either fractures or starts deforming plastically. It is…
Solids subject to continuous changes of temperature or mechanical load often exhibit discontinuous avalanche-like responses. For instance, avalanche dynamics have been observed during plastic deformation, fracture, domain switching in…
Materials are often heterogeneous at various length scales, with variations in grain structure, defects, and composition which has a strong influence on the emergent macroscopic plastic behavior. In particular, heterogeneities lead to…