Inelastic rotations and pseudo-turbulent plastic avalanches in crystals

Abstract: Plastic deformations in crystals often produce textures in the form of randomly oriented patches of the unstressed lattice. We use a novel mesoscopic Landau-type model of crystal plasticity to show that in such textures large crystallographic lattice rotations can originate from a highly coordinated inelastic slip at the microscale. Our numerical experiments show that dislocation avalanches, which lead to the formation of such rotations, involve pseudo-turbulent motions with power-law distributed spatial correlations.