Twin Boundaries merely as Intrinsically Kinematic Barriers for Screw Dislocation Motion in FCC Metals

Metals with nanoscale twins have shown ultrahigh strength and excellent ductility, attributed to the role of twin boundaries (TBs) as strong barriers for the motion of lattice dislocations. Though observed in both experiments and simulations, the barrier effect of TBs is rarely studied quantitatively. Here, with atomistic simulations and continuum based anisotropic bicrystal models, we find that the long-range interaction force between coherent TBs and screw dislocations is negligible. Further simulations of the pileup behavior of screw dislocations in front of TBs suggest that screw dislocations can be blocked kinematically by TBs due to the change of slip plane, leading to the pileup of subsequent dislocations with the elastic repulsion actually from the pinned dislocation in front of the TB. Our results well explain the experimental observations that the variation of yield strength with twin thickness for ultrafine-grained copper follows the Hall-Petch relationship.