The Force on a Dislocation Near a Weakly Bonded Interface

The physical system being studied here is an elastic dislocation in proximity to a material interface which has limited strength in shear. The configuration is relevant to elastic strain relaxation in bonded thin-film semiconductor material structures. A plane strain boundary value problem is formulated and an exact solution for the force on the dislocation versus distance from the interface is obtained. If the dislocation is close enough to the interface, its stress field causes irreversible slip across the interface. This slip, in turn, induces an attractive force on the dislocation. For the case of an edge dislocation with Burgers vector normal to the interface, it is found that the dislocation has a stable equilibrium position at a small distance from the interface. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.