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Nanoindentation and microcrystal deformation are two methods that allow probing size effects in crystal plasticity. In many cases of microcrystal deformation, scale-free and potentially universal intermittency of event sizes during plastic flow has been revealed, whereas nanoindentation has been mainly used to assess the stress statistics of the first pop-in. Here, we show that both methods of deformation exhibit fundamentally different event-size statistics obtained from plastic instabilities. Nanoindentation results in scale-dependent intermittent microplasticity best described by Weibull statistics (stress and magnitude of the first pop-in) and lognormal statistics (magnitude of higher-order pop-ins). In contrast, finite-volume microcrystal deformation of the same material exhibits microplastic event-size intermittency of truncated power-law type even when the same plastic volume as in nanoindentation is probed. Furthermore, we successfully test a previously proposed extreme-value statistics model that relates the average first critical stress to the shape and scale parameter of the underlying Weibull distribution. 

Due to fluctuations in nearest-neighbor distances and chemistry within the unit cell, high-entropy alloys are believed to have a much higher resistance to dislocation motion than pure crystals. Here, we investigate the coarse-grained dynamics of a number of dislocations being active during a slip event. We found that the time-resolved dynamics of slip is practically identical in Au〈001〉 and an Al0.3CoCrFeNi〈001〉 high-entropy alloy, but much faster than in Nb〈001〉. Differences between the FCC-crystals are seen in the spatiotemporal velocity profile, with faster acceleration and slower velocity relaxation in the high-entropy alloy. Assessing distributions that characterize the intermittently evolving plastic flow reveals material-dependent scaling exponents for size, duration, and velocity–size distributions. The results are discussed in view of the underlying dislocation mobility.