Elastic Instability of Grain Boundaries and the Physical Origin of Superplasticity

Matter between contiguous crystallites is assimilated to a thin elastic plate immersed in a different elastic medium. It is shown that a shear stress exceeding a critical value should corrugate the boundary and induce periodic normal stress fields in the two adjacent crystal surfaces, which cause motion of vacancies in closed loops between the two crystals. The consequent cyclic transport of atoms in the opposite sense determines crystal sliding at a temperature dependent relative speed. Most of the phenomenology of superplastic allows follows in a quantitative manner.