Recoverable creep deformation due to heterogeneous grain-boundary diffusion and sliding

Recently, Rajagopalan et al. [J. Rajagopalan, J. Han, M.T. Saif, Science, 315 (2007) 1831] studied deformation in free-standing face-centered cubic nanocrystalline thin films and reported that “plastic” deformation in these films is partially recoverable. Here we perform numerical simulations to show that this phenomenon could be explained from the point of view of heterogeneous grain-boundary diffusion and sliding.