Slip geometry: the critical resolved shear stress

Slip occurs by dislocation motion. To move dislocations, a certain stress must be applied to
overcome the resistance to dislocation motion. This is discussed further in the Introduction
to dislocations package on this site.
It is observed experimentally that slip occurs when the shear stress acting in the slip
direction on the slip plane reaches some critical value. This critical shear stress is related to
the stress required to move dislocations across the slip plane.
The tensile yield stress of a material is the applied stress required to start plastic
deformation of the material under a tensile load. We want to relate the tensile stress applied
to a sample to the shear stress that acts along the slip direction. This can be done as follows.
Consider applying a tensile stress along the long axis of a cylindrical single crystal sample
with cross-sectional area A:

The applied force along the tensile axis is F = A. If slip occurs on the slip plane shown in the
diagram, with plane normal n, then the slip direction will lie in this plane. We can calculate
the resolved shear stress acting parallel to the slip direction on the slip plane as follows.
The area of the slip plane is A/cos , where is the angle between the tensile axis and the
slip plane normal.
The component of the axial force F that lies parallel to the slip direction is F cos . The
resolved shear stress on the slip plane parallel to the slip direction is therefore given by:

It is found that the value of R at which slip occurs in a given material with
specified dislocation density and purity is a constant, known as the critical resolved shear
stress C. This is Schmid's Law.
The quantity cos cos is called the Schmid factor. The tensile stress at which the crystal
starts to slip is known as the yield stress y, and corresponds to the quantity F/A in the above
equation.
Symbolically, therefore, Schmid's Law can be written:

C = y cos cos
In a given crystal, there may be many available slip systems. As the tensile load is
increased, the resolved shear stress on each system increases until eventually C is reached
on one system. The crystal begins to plastically deform by slip on this system, known as
the primary slip system. The stress required to cause slip on the primary slip system is
the yield stress of the single crystal. As the load is increased further, C may be reached on
other slip systems; these then begin to operate.
From Schmid's Law, it is apparent that the primary slip system will be the system with
the greatest Schmid factor. It is possible to calculate the values of cos cos for every slip
system and subsequently determine which slip system operates first. This can be time
consuming, but for cubic crystal systems, the OILS rule and Diehl's rule provide quick routes
to identifying the primary slip system.