It was recalled that inherent difficulties arose in the phenomenological description of the behavior of dislocation ensembles, and were associated with collective effects. This implied that the properties of a defect ensemble were not identical to the sum of the properties of the individual defects. The occurrence of defect ensembles was treated as being the result of involving a new structural level (mesolevel) whose behavior, in many aspects, introduced wave properties into the process of plastic deformation. The properties and laws which governed the processes that occurred at the mesolevel were considered here on the basis of a field theory of defects.

The Field Theory of Defects at the Meso-Level. J.V.Grinyaev, V.E.Panin: Physics – Doklady, 1997, 42[3], 108-10