Covariant formula for the driving force for interface migration

Abstract

Interfaces of crystalline materials are strongly affected by the anisotropy of interface energy. A key quantity in this context is the interface stiffness tensor, which characterizes the response of the interface energy to changes in interface orientation and plays a role in determining the driving force for interface migration. The latter is expressible via contraction of the stiffness tensor and interface curvature tensor. Practical computations involving tensors necessarily rely on their individual components. In this work, an explicit component-wise expression is derived for the contraction of the stiffness and curvature tensors, valid in arbitrary coordinate systems. Within this formulation, to get the driving force, the curvature tensor is contracted with the pullback of a stiffness-related tensor - originally defined in three-dimensional Euclidean space - onto the interface manifold. This covariant treatment establishes a physically consistent foundation for three-dimensional computational models involving interface stiffness.