Interpreting Force Response Patterns of a Mechanically Driven Crystallographic Phase Transition

TL;DR

This paper presents a statistical framework to interpret stochastic stress responses during crystallographic phase transitions, enabling insights into energy landscapes and kinetics of solid-to-solid transformations.

Contribution

It introduces a probabilistic approach to analyze mechanical response patterns, linking stochasticity to the physical principles of phase transformations.

Findings

Stochastic responses can reliably reveal energy profiles.

Probabilistic models explain dynamic stress responses.

Quantitative insights into transformation kinetics are achieved.

Abstract

Mechanically induced crystallographic phase transformation that reflects dynamic stress responses of intrinsically stochastic nature is a pertinent yet much less well-understood phenomenon. We focus on understanding the physical significance of stochasticity and how it can enable inference of principles underlying a crystallographic phase transformation. For interpreting the mechanical responses, a statistical approach of mapping the transformation dynamics to a probabilistic escape of crystallographic states defined on a free energy landscape is shown to reliably explain the patterns of response. We demonstrate that stochastic responses associated with a structural phase transformation can offer a reliable quantitative tool for unravelling the energy profile, intrinsic kinetics, and microscopic details of solid-to-solid crystallographic transitions.