How Grain Growth Stops: A Mechanism for Grain-Growth Stagnation in Pure Materials

Taking the Rough with the Smooth Even with extensive annealing at high temperatures, most polycrystalline materials will not become a perfect single crystal, which would represent the thermodynamically preferred state. The stability of the polycrystalline state has been attributed to the presence of impurities that accumulate at the grain boundaries, but even very pure materials show grain growth stagnation. Using simulations, Holm and Foiles (p. 1138 ) show that grain boundaries can be classified as “rough” and “smooth.” Rough boundaries move continuously with well-defined activation energies, while the smooth boundaries have low mobility and move in a jerky, stepwise manner. With heating, a boundary can change from smooth to rough, but the transition temperature can vary by hundreds of degrees from one grain boundary to the next. These smooth, low-mobility boundaries thus pin the polycrystalline structure, even in the absence of impurities.