Slip and twinning in Bravais lattices

Abstract

A unified treatment of slip and twinning in Bravais lattices is given, focussing on the case of cubic symmetry, and using the Ericksen energy well formulation, so that interfaces correspond to rank-one connections between the infinitely many crystallographically equivalent energy wells. Twins are defined to be such rank-one connections involving a nontrivial reflection of the lattice across some plane. The slips and twins minimizing shear magnitude for cubic lattices are rigorously calculated, and the conjugates of these and other slips analyzed. It is observed that all rank-one connections between the energy wells for the dual of a Bravais lattice can be obtained explicitly from those for the original lattice, so that in particular the rank-one connections for fcc can be obtained explicitly from those for bcc.