Recovery is a process that kicks in at low temperatures; in this stage, the excess defects are annealed out, dislocations of opposite signs annihilate each other, and dislocations align to form low energy configurations, namely tilt and twist boundaries. In Figure 1 for example, we show how a wall of edge dislocations form a tilt boundary. In the recovery stage, however, the energy released through the annihilation and rearrangment of dislocations is not considerable.
Figure 1: A wall of edge dislocations form a tilt grain ; it is a small
angle grain boundary; the inter-dislocation separation in the grain boundary
is decided by the misorientation between the two grains and the Burgers
vector.
