Realistic time-scale fully atomistic simulations of surface nucleation of dislocations in pristine nanopillars

We use our recently proposed accelerated dynamics algorithm (Tiwary and van de Walle, 2011) to calculate temperature and stress dependence of activation free energy for surface nucleation of dislocations in pristine Gold nanopillars under realistic loads. While maintaining fully atomistic resolution, we achieve the fraction of a second time-scale regime. We find that the activation free energy depends significantly and non-linearly on the driving force (stress or strain) and temperature, leading to very high activation entropies. We also perform compression tests on Gold nanopillars for strain-rates varying between 7 orders of magnitudes, reaching as low as 10^3/s. Our calculations bring out the perils of high strain-rate Molecular Dynamics calculations: we find that while the failure mechanism for <001> compression of Gold nanopillars remains the same across the entire strain-rate range, the elastic limit (defined as stress for nucleation of the first dislocation) depends significantly on the strain-rate. We also propose a new methodology that overcomes some of the limits in our original accelerated dynamics scheme (and accelerated dynamics methods in general). We lay out our methods in sufficient details so as to be used for understanding and predicting deformation mechanism under realistic driving forces for various problems.