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Updated: Apr 15, 2026

Atom Probe Tomography Studies on the CuIn,GaSe2 Grain Boundaries
Published on: April 22, 2013
Morphological instability of grain boundaries in two-phase coherent solids
Pierre-Antoine Geslin1, Yechuan Xu1, Alain Karma1
1Physics Department and Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Complex Systems, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
Abstract:
We show both computationally and analytically that grain boundaries that exhibit shear-coupled motion become morphologically unstable in solid alloys that phase separate into coherent domains of distinct chemical compositions. We carry out simulations of continuum models demonstrating that this instability is mediated by long-range elastic interaction between compositional domains and grain boundaries. In addition, we perform a linear stability analysis that predicts the range of unstable wavelengths in good quantitative agreement with simulations. In nonlinear stages, this pattern-forming instability leads to the breakup of low-angle grain boundaries, thereby strongly impacting microstructural evolution in a wide range of phase-separating materials.
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