The stress-induced point defect-dislocation interaction and its relevance to irradiation creep

Abstract

The general interaction energy between an applied stress and a misfitting inhomogeneity is presented and used to deduce the accurate elastic interaction between edge dislocations and point defects in a body subjected to uniaxial tension. It is shown that the external stress does, as conjectured by Heald and Speight (1974), cause a preferential drift of interstitials and vacancies to dislocations with particular orientations to the external stress axis. Moreover, for a physically plausible range of the inhomogeneity representation of the point defects the particular preferences found are consistent with those necessary to validate the mechanism of irradiation creep proposed by Heald and Speight.