| Abstract Scope |
Although grain boundaries are easy to define in continuum settings – they are the common boundary shared by a pair of adjacent crystals – they are extremely challenging to precisely define, or even characterize, on the atomic scale. Decades of careful work have resulted in a broad and deep understanding of the atomic structure of grain boundaries. Conventional approaches, however, are often limited to special kinds of grain boundaries in special kinds of systems. This talk will describe a new statistical description of grain boundary structure suitable for studying general systems such as those described by thermodynamic ensembles, including ones far from their “ground states”. We will show that this characterization is primarily determined by macroscopic degrees of freedom, and is only minimally affected by thermal noise, differences in local density, the presence of defects, and other variations in microscopic degrees of freedom. |