The Burst Time Duration in Micropillar Deformation

Plastic flow of single crystal micropillars proceeds through a sequence of intermittent burst slips. The burst time durations are investigated based on an extended theoretical model which incorporates the observed power-law distribution of burst sizes in compression experiments of micropillars. The results show that the burst time durations exhibit a powerlaw behavior with an exponential cutoff, suggesting the same scaling behaviors as the burst sizes. In addition, the predicted scaling exponent is found to converge to a value of ～1.6. It is demonstrated that our results are consistent with the experimental data.