“…Relaxation tests are particularly well adapted for nanocrystalline materials, for which several mechanisms are in competition [14,15]: many studies reveal dislocation nucleations and propagations [16,17,18], diffusion [19,20,21], grain boundary sliding, migration, rotation or growth [22,23,24,25,26,27] -these mechanisms often cooperate and accommodate one another. It is hoped that the activation volume determination will be a method to characterize macroscopically the leading plasticity mechanism operating in the material [28,29,10,30,31,32,33]. Moreover, the thermodynamic instability of nanocrystalline metals being evidenced by the potential grain growth [34,23], it is relevant to monitor the relaxation of a nanocrystalline sample all along a stress-strain curve.…”