title: Dislocation jamming and andrade creep.
abstract: We simulate the glide motion of an assembly of interacting dislocations under the action of an external shear stress and show that the associated plastic creep relaxation follows Andrade's law. Our results indicate that Andrade creep in plastically deforming crystals involves the correlated motion of dislocation structures near a dynamic transition separating a flowing from a jammed phase. Simulations in the presence of dislocation multiplication and noise confirm the robustness of this finding and highlight the importance of metastable structure formation for the relaxation process.
authors.affiliation: Departament de Física Fonamental, Facultat de Física, Universitat de Barcelona, Avinguda Diagonal 647, Spain.
authors.forename: M-Carmen
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Miguel
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vespignani
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zaiser
authors.forename: Stefano
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zapperi