A unified treatment of evolving interfaces accounting for small deformations and atomic transport: grain-boundaries, phase transitions, epitaxy

Abstract

This review presents a unified treatment of several topics at the intersection of continuum mechanics and materials science; the thrust concerns processes involving evolving interfaces, focusing on grain-boundaries, solid-vapor interfaces (with emphasis on epitaxy), and coherent phase-transitions. Central to our discussion is the interaction of deformation, atomic transport, and accretion within a dissipative, dynamical framework, but as our interest is crystalline materials, we restrict our attention to small deformations. To avoid geometrical complications associated with surfaces in R^3, we work in two space-dimensions when discussing interfaces, but in R^3 when discussing the theory in bulk.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe