Grain Boundary Phase Transitions Enable Diffusionless Climb of Disconnections

Abstract

Dislocation-grain boundary (GB) interactions govern the mechanical response of polycrystalline materials by controlling dislocation absorption, transmission, and interfacial plasticity. While disconnection climb is conventionally understood to require the absorption or emission of point defects supplied through long range bulk diffusion, GBs possess intrinsic configurational degrees of freedom associated with their atomic structure, or microstate, that may provide an alternative mechanism. Here, using bicrystallography and molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate the interaction of shear dislocation loops with the [1 1 0](-5 5 14) symmetric tilt grain boundary in Al. We show that dislocation absorption generates a mobile extrinsic disconnection with a nonzero climb component that propagates conservatively along the interface without long-range bulk point-defect transport. Its motion is accompanied by a localized GB phase transformation mediated by cooperative atomic rearrangements within the GB core, producing successive metastable GB microstates. These findings establish a direct coupling between lattice dislocations and GB phase evolution and reveal a conservative mechanism for disconnection climb fundamentally distinct from conventional vacancy-mediated climb.