Overview on dislocation-point defect interaction: the brownian picture of dislocation motion

The interactions between dislocations (D) and point defects (PD) are one of the most important causes of mechanical damping in metals. In the past 40 years, many experimental results have been obtained and published, from which it appears that two fundamental behaviors can be observed when dislocations interact with motionless point defects: thermally activated behaviors and athermal behaviors. In this paper, it is shown that these two observed behaviors can be consistently explained by a “brownian picture” of the motion of dislocations interacting with PD distributed at different distances from the dislocation glide plane.