Pinning of extended dislocations in atomically disordered crystals

TL;DR

This paper explores how atomic-scale disorder affects the pinning and behavior of extended dislocations with partials in complex alloys, combining theoretical modifications with atomistic and dislocation dynamics simulations.

Contribution

It introduces modifications to elastic manifold pinning theory for extended dislocations with partials, considering stacking faults and geometrical effects, supported by simulations.

Findings

Stacking faults introduce an additional stress scale affecting pinning.

Multiple metastable states exist below the depinning threshold.

Geometrical constraints can enhance dislocation pinning.

Abstract

In recent years there has been renewed interest in the behavior of dislocations in crystals that exhibit strong atomic scale disorder, as typical of compositionally complex single phase alloys. The behavior of dislocations in such crystals has been often studied in the framework of elastic manifold pinning in disordered systems. Here we discuss modifications of this framework that may need to be adapted when dealing with extended dislocations that split into widely separated partials. We demonstrate that the presence of a stacking fault gives rise to an additional stress scale that needs to be compared with the pinning stress of elastic manifold theory to decide whether the partials are pinned individually or the dislocation is pinned as a whole. For the case of weakly interacting partial dislocations, we demonstrate the existence of multiple metastable states at stresses below the depinning threshold and analyze the stress evolution of the stacking fault width during loading. In addition we investigate how geometrical constraints can modulate the dislocation-solute interaction and enhance the pinning stress. We compare our theoretical arguments with results of atomistic and discrete (partial) dislocation dynamics (D(P)DD) simulations.