Universality of Deformation Down to the Nanoscale

Deformation on macroscopic scales is often modeled as a continuous process, which in reality occurs via a sequence of nanometer-sized discrete slips. We report statistical analyses of slip size distributions obtained by uniaxial compression experiments on nano-crystals of different crystal structures and sizes down to 75 nm. We show that a simple mean field theory (MFT) correctly predicts the statistical behavior by collapsing data using the MFT exponents and scaling function. This study demonstrates that a simple model captures the statistics and universality class of discrete deformation events in a variety of metallic nano-crystals down to the smallest experimentally accessed length scales.