Anomalous interaction between dislocations and ultra-small voids

Abstract

We carry out the molecular statics simulations of depinning of an edge dislocation at voids of diameters of the order of ~1 nm. We show that the dislocation-void interactions are non-trivial as the applied shear load is found to enhance the pinning strength of the nanovoid itself. This leads to the surprising observation of multiple CRSS values for a given nanovoid.