The Climbing Motion of Faulted Dislocation Loops Induced by Elastic Interaction

The movement of faulted dislocation loops during annealing has been studied with transmission electron microscopy using the usual stereotechnique. It is revealed that the distance between two nearby faulted dislocation loops in a thin foil varies during annealing at 95°C for 2 hours without their sizes changing. This variation in distance is considered to occur by pipe diffusion due to the elastic interaction between the loops. The vacancy concentration and the vacancy flow along the perimeter of the loops are calculated by considering the interaction force between their segments. It is shown that the vacancy flow that moves loops exists when the distance between loops is less than 200 Å. The activation energy for pipe diffusion is estimated to be about 0.90 eV.