Slip bands in metals

Slip bands or stretcher-strain marks are localized bands of plastic deformation in metals experiencing stresses. Formation of slip bands indicates a concentrated unidirectional slip on certain planes causing a stress concentration. Typically, slip bands induce surface steps (e.g., roughness due persistent slip bands during fatigue) and a stress concentration which can be a crack nucleation site. Slip bands extend until impinged by a boundary, and the generated stress from dislocations pile-up against that boundary will either stop or transmit the operating slip depending on its (mis)orientation.

Formation of slip bands under cyclic conditions is addressed as persistent slip bands (PSBs) where formation under monotonic condition is addressed as dislocation planar arrays (or simply slip-bands, see Slip bands in the absence of cyclic loading section). Slip-bands can be simply viewed as boundary sliding due to dislocation glide that lacks (the complexity of ) PSBs high plastic deformation localisation manifested by tongue- and ribbon-like extrusion. And, where PSBs normally studied with (effective) Burgers vector aligned with the extrusion plane because a PSB extends across the grain and exacerbates during fatigue; a monotonic slip-band has a Burger’s vector for propagation and another for plane extrusions both controlled by the conditions at the tip.