Applications of nonequilibrium melting concept to damage-accumulation processes

The authors recent study of crystalline-to-amorphous transformation led to the successful development of a unified thermodynamic description of disorder-induced amorphization and heat-induced melting, based on a generalized version of the Lindemann melting criterion. The generalized criterion requires that the melting temperature of a defective crystal decreases with increasing static atomic disorder. Hence, any crystal can melt at temperatures below the melting point of its perfect crystalline state when driven far from equilibrium by introducing critical amounts of misfitting solute atoms and lattice imperfections, radiation damage, and/or tensile stresses. This conceptual approach to nonequilibrium melting provides new insight into long-standing materials problems such as brittle fracture, embrittlement, and environmentally-induced cracking, for example irradiation-assisted stress corrosion cracking