The purpose of the research work in the area of mechanical properties of materials is to investigate: 1) grain boundaries and the effect of defects (impurities or vacncies) on grain boundaries cohesion; 2) grain boundary sliding; 3) dislocation core properties; 4) cross slip properties; 5) effect of chemistry and alloying on dislocation core properties and cross slip; and 6) implications of the topology of the charge density on the stability of planar faults and cleavage . The figure shows the topology of the electron charge density in silver as a function of shear displacement on the (011) plane. The panels correspond to three shear displacements along the <112]> direction (shown by the solid arrow) normalized to the burgers vector for the bulk configuration (a), the unstable stacking fault (b) and the intrinsic stacking fault (c). The atoms along the shearing direction denote two atoms on the A plane and the offset atom is an atom on the C plane. Note that the critical point between the long A-C bond is a local minimum while the critical point between the short A-C bond is a saddle point. {From Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 125501 (2002).}
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