  The thermodynamic theory of dislocation-enabled plasticity is based on two
unconventional hypotheses. The first of these is that a system of dislocations,
driven by external forces and irreversibly exchanging heat with its
environment, must be characterized by a thermodynamically defined effective
temperature that is not the same as the ordinary temperature. The second
hypothesis is that the overwhelmingly dominant mechanism controlling plastic
deformation is thermally activated depinning of entangled pairs of
dislocations. This paper consists of a systematic reformulation of this theory
followed by examples of its use in analyses of experimentally observed
phenomena including strain hardening, grain-size (Hall-Petch) effects, yielding
transitions, and adiabatic shear banding.
