Imaging screw dislocations at atomic resolution by aberration-corrected electron optical sectioning.

Screw dislocations play an important role in materials' mechanical, electrical and optical properties. However, imaging the atomic displacements in screw dislocations remains challenging. Although advanced electron microscopy techniques have allowed atomic-scale characterization of edge dislocations from the conventional end-on view, for screw dislocations, the atoms are predominantly displaced parallel to the dislocation line, and therefore the screw displacements are parallel to the electron beam and become invisible when viewed end-on. Here we show that screw displacements can be imaged directly with the dislocation lying in a plane transverse to the electron beam by optical sectioning using annular dark field imaging in a scanning transmission electron microscope. Applying this technique to a mixed [a+c] dislocation in GaN allows direct imaging of a screw dissociation with a 1.65-nm dissociation distance, thereby demonstrating a new method for characterizing dislocation core structures.

Direct observation of depth-dependent atomic displacements associated with dislocations in gallium nitride.

We demonstrate that the aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope has a sufficiently small depth of field to observe depth-dependent atomic displacements in a crystal. The depth-dependent displacements associated with the Eshelby twist of dislocations in GaN normal to the foil with a screw component of the Burgers vector are directly imaged. We show that these displacements are observed as a rotation of the lattice between images taken in a focal series. From the sense of the rotation, the sign of the screw component can be determined.

Cooperative nucleation of shear dislocation loops.

The mean elastic interaction between randomly distributed transient subcritical shear loops of the same sign, formed in the presence of an applied shear stress, is the "image stress." This stress is proportional to the volume density of loops and has the same sign as the applied stress. The image stress promotes the cooperative nucleation of shear loops, and leads to an instability in which the number of loops and the image stress increase rapidly, leading to the generation of stable expanding loops. The critical stress at which the instability is predicted is relatively high.