Formation of stable sessile interstitial complexes in reactions between glissile dislocation loops in bcc Fe

Clusters of self-interstitial atoms (loops) are commonly observed in the microstructure of irradiated metals. These clusters can be formed directly in high-energy displacement cascades or by growth as a result of interaction between individual self interstitials. The majority of these clusters have features of glissile dislocation loops and migrate by fast one-dimensional glide. In this paper, we present results of a systematic molecular dynamics (MD) study of reactions involving glissile interstitial loops. By the example of bcc iron we demonstrate that the reactions can produce a number of specific, stable microstructural features, with different properties compared to the reactants. Namely, the reactions between the most common glissile clusters of 〈1 1 1〉 crowdions can result in coarsening or formation of immobile self interstitial complexes. The coarsening leads to a decrease of the total dislocation line length and therefore is favourable. The structure and stability of the junction formed in the reactions has been studied using many-body potentials and density functional theory (DFT) techniques. No evidence of the formation of a 〈1 0 0〉 loop from two glissile 〈1 1 1〉 clusters was found among the studied reactions. The immobile self interstitial complexes that form as a result of these reaction have, however, high binding energies, of the order of tens of eV, implying that a relatively long life time should be assigned to the resulting configurations and therefore that such objects are expected to contribute to the evolution of the microstructure under irradiation.