Title: Avalanches and Plastic Flow in Crystal Plasticity: An Overview,
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.