Kinetics for thermally activated dislocation motion in periodic potentials

Abstract A theory is presented which shows that all kinds of dislocation motion involving periodie potentials can be described in terms of a dislocation mobility. The formalism is applied to a dislocation with a mobile pinning point, where the concept of mobility has been used previously. However, the main issue is that for dislocation motion by the double-kink mechanism, a mobility can also be defined. It is then shown that the Bordoni peak is a superposition of Debye relaxation peaks with different activation energies. The theory accounts for all experimental features of the Bordoni and Alefeld peaks.