Comment on "Giant Plasticity of a Quantum Crystal"

In their Letter, Haziot et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 110 (2013) 035301] report a novel phenomenon of giant plasticity for hcp Helium-4 quantum crystals. They assert that Helium-4 exhibits mechanical properties not found in classical plasticity theory. Specifically, they examine high-quality crystals as a function of temperature and applied strain, where the shear modulus reaches a plateau and dissipation becomes close to zero; both quantities are reported to be independent of stress and strain, implying a reversible dissipation process and quantum tunneling. In this Comment, we show that these signatures can be explained with a classical model of thermally activated dislocation glide without the need to invoke quantum tunneling or dissipationless motion. Recently, we proposed a dislocation glide model in solid Helium-4 containing the dissipation contribution in the presence of other dislocations with qualitatively similar behavior [Zhou et al., Philos. Mag. Lett. 92 (2012) 608].