It was recalled that it was still unclear whether, during the plastic deformation of crystalline materials, long-range dislocation-dislocation interactions that did not have any intrinsic range could lead to spatial patterns which exhibited well-defined characteristic scales. It was demonstrated, for a general model of 2-dimensional dislocation systems, that spontaneously emerging dislocation pair correlations introduced a length scale which was proportional to the mean dislocation spacing. General properties of pair correlation functions were derived, and explicit calculations were performed for the simple special case of pair correlations in single-glide dislocation dynamics. It was shown that, in this case, the dislocation system exhibited a patterning instability which led to the formation of walls that were normal to the glide plane.

Statistical Dynamics of Dislocation Systems - the Influence of Dislocation-Dislocation Correlations. M.Zaiser, M.C.Miguel, I.Groma: Physical Review B, 2001, 64[22], 224102 (9pp)