Institute of Metals Division - Dislocation Sources and the Strength of Magnesium Oxide Single Crystals

This paper compares the room-temperature mechanical behavior of magnesium oxide crystals containing 'fresh' and 'grown in' sources. 'Fresh' dislocation sources introduced by cleavage or mechanical contact move and multiply to generate slip bands at 3000 psi. Macroscopically the crystals yield smoothly at 6000 psi and can be quite ductile. When 'fresh' sources are eliminated by chemical polishing the crystals have to rely on 'grown in' sources to initiate slip. They then deform elastically up to extremely high stresses (-30 to 50,000 psi) yielding with a sharp stress drop down to the level at which Ifresh' sources operate. Grown in' sources are considered to be associated with impurity wecipitate particles or inclusions. Annealing crystals at 2000°C dissolves these particles thereby eliminating sources for slip. The crystals then become consistently stronger (> 70,000 psi) approaching within 1/10 of the theoretical strength. Dislocations of the grown-in network do not move under stress to nucleate slip. It is proposed that they are locked electrostatically. DISLOCATIONS were originally conceived to resolve the large discrepency between the theoretical and real strength of solids. The idea that slip propagates by the movement of dislocations is now well confirmed both by electron transmission and etch pit studies. But this by itself is not sufficient to explain the low yield strength of crystals for there is still the need to understand where slip dislocations originally come from. Theoretical estimates place the stress to generate dislocations homogeneously in the lattice at approximately 1/30 of the shear modulus,' a value 104 to 105 times greater than the stress at which the very first manifestations of plastic deformation have been observed. Only an special cases can the theoretical strength be approached; in crystals of high perfection such as whiskers2 where dislocation sources do not preexist and in covalent crystals where the dislocations present at room temperature are almost completely immobilized by the bond character of the solid.3,4 For the most part it is necessary to assume that the yield strength of ionic and metallic solids corresponds to the motivation and multiplication of dislocation sources present beforehand. The question as to their origin appeared to be answered by the suggestion of Frank and Read5 that dislocations forming part of the grown-in structure could operate as a mill for the large scale production of dislocations. The Frank-Read mechanism is still widely accepted as the source of dislocations but a number of observations have been reported which are in serious disagreement with it. One of the most intriguing of these is that under normal testing conditions dislocations of the grown-in network appear to play no role in the plastic deformation of rock salt structure ionic solids. This was first reported in the etch pit studies on lithium fluoride by Gilman and Johnston6 and is true also for magnesium oxide. To explain the comparatively low yield stress of lithium fluoride it was proposed by a number of authors7,9 that small unresolved prismatic loops formed by vacancy condensation were acting either directly or indirectly as the dislocation sources. This proposal led Gilman10 to perform a series of detailed and careful experiments on lithium fluoride to try to identify the sources responsible for the initiation of slip. He concluded that prismatic loops played no general role and that other sources were more important. Dislocation sources in ionic crystals can be divided into two general categories. First, there