# Avalanches and Plastic Flow in Crystal Plasticity: An Overview

## TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of dislocation avalanches in crystal plasticity, highlighting their role in plastic flow, experimental observations, theoretical models, and computational approaches at the nanoscale.

## Contribution

It synthesizes current knowledge on dislocation avalanche physics and their impact on strain bursts in crystal plasticity, integrating experimental, theoretical, and computational perspectives.

## Key findings

- Dislocation avalanches are fundamental to nanoscale plastic flow.
- Experimental and computational methods reveal complex avalanche dynamics.
- Theoretical models help predict strain burst behavior.

## Abstract

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 long-range interactions. The outcome of such complexity is the emergence of dislocation avalanches as the basic mechanism of plastic flow in solids at the nanoscale. While the deformation behavior of bulk materials appears smooth, a predictive model should clearly be based upon the character of these dislocation avalanches and their associated strain bursts. We provide here a comprehensive overview of experimental observations, theoretical models and computational approaches that have been developed to unravel the multiple aspects of dislocation avalanche physics and the phenomena leading to strain bursts in crystal plasticity.