An investigation was made of the diffusion of a grain boundary in a crystalline material. In particular, the case of a regularly-spaced low-angle grain boundary, treated as an array of dislocations that interacted with one another via long-range stress fields and the crystalline Peierls-Nabarro potential, was considered. The method used to analyze the dynamics of the centre of mass of the grain boundary, and of its spatio-temporal fluctuations, was based upon overdamped Langevin equations. The generality and efficiency of this technique was confirmed by its agreement with molecular dynamics simulations.

Grain Boundary Diffusion in a Peierls–Nabarro Potential. F.Leoni, S.Zapperi: Journal of Statistical Mechanics, 2007, P12004