The effects of the narrowing and branching of screw slip-bands during the plastic straining of non-uniformly doped or non-uniformly irradiated layered crystals were considered on the basis of the equations of dislocation kinetics. Band formation was treated as a process which involved the self-organization of dislocations into an ensemble at the mesoscopic level. The distributions of the densities of mobile and immobile dislocations, as well as the local plastic strain-rate in a slip-band which propagated in a layered crystal, were estimated. It was found that band-narrowing was due to the lower rate of band-broadening in stiff layers, than in soft layers which had not been hardened by doping or irradiation. Branching was attributed to the low local strain-rate in stiff layers as compared with the strain-rate per slip band which was imposed by the testing machine. In the latter case, nucleation of new bands or branching of existing bands was required in order to restore the balance between these rates.

Features of Slip-Band Formation during the Plastic Straining of Layered Crystals. G.A.Malygin: Fizika Tverdogo Tela, 1999, 41[2], 252-8 (Physics of the Solid State, 1999, 41[2], 252-8