TY - JOUR T1 - Yielding and Irreversible Deformation below the Microscale: Surface Effects and Non-Mean-Field Plastic Avalanches A1 - Moretti, Paolo A1 - Cerruti, Benedetta A1 - Miguel, M.-Carmen Y1 - 2011/06/07 N2 - Nanoindentation techniques recently developed to measure the mechanical response of crystals under external loading conditions reveal new phenomena upon decreasing sample size below the microscale. At small length scales, material resistance to irreversible deformation depends on sample morphology. Here we study the mechanisms of yield and plastic flow in inherently small crystals under uniaxial compression. Discrete structural rearrangements emerge as a series of abrupt discontinuities in stress-strain curves. We obtain the theoretical dependence of the yield stress on system size and geometry and elucidate the statistical properties of plastic deformation at such scales. Our results show that the absence of dislocation storage leads to crucial effects on the statistics of plastic events, ultimately affecting the universal scaling behavior observed at larger scales. JF - PLOS ONE JA - PLOS ONE VL - 6 IS - 6 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0020418 SP - e20418 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020418 ER -