Plastic Deformation from Dislocation Motion

If you pull on something hard enough, we understand that it will deform. However, one thing that might surprise you is that it actually takes a lot less energy to deform something than we originally thought. The shear modulus G is actually the stress that it is supposed to take to cause an entire plane of atoms to slip. In practice though, it is much less than that. That is because dislocations do not happen all at once. By having a dislocation move through a material step by step, it takes far less energy.