Who are the survivors? An investigation of long-time grain growth

• Paths of individual grains are extracted from long-time grain growth Simulations. • Largest grains/grains with most edges tend to persist longest, in general only. • Grains of similar size and topology may show completely different growth paths. • The local grain environment is the important influential factor. • Self-similar edge distributions form in a complex manner. Analytic mean-field theories predict the average behavior of an evolving grain structure. They are unable to forecast the unique behavior of individual grains, though. This is due to the fact that topological transitions affect each grain’s development route specifically. Hence, stochasticity is introduced into the grain paths by topological transitions. Because of this, mean field theories generally agree with the average path of individual grains only. In this work, the paths of individual grains are extracted from a long-time Monte Carlo simulation of grain growth and examined in detail. We show that although grains with large sizes and many faces/edges are likely to persist for long annealing times, this is not always the case.