Classical mobility of highly mobile crystal defects

Abstract

Highly mobile crystal defects such as crowdions and prismatic dislocation loops exhibit an anomalous temperature independent mobility unexplained by phonon scattering analysis. Using a projection operator, without recourse to elasticity, we derive analytic expressions for the mobility of highly mobile defects and dislocations which may be efficiently evaluated in molecular dynamics simulation. The theory explains how a temperature-independent mobility arises because defect motion is not an eigenmode of the Hessian, an implicit assumption in all previous treatments.