“…Transient stress relaxation caused by the combination of interfacial diffusion and sliding in particulate and fibrous composites and in polycrystalline solids has been investigated (see, for example, Sofronis and McMeeking [1], Onaka et al [2,3], He [4], He and Hu [5], Wang and Pan [6], Wang et al [7] and Wei et al [8]). The long-range interfacial diffusion is driven by the chemical potential gradients on the interface [9], whilst interfacial sliding is due to short-range diffusion on a length scale comparable to the size of the asperities of the interface [10].…”