It was noted that the ability, to image individual dislocation kinks directly, offered many possibilities for the study of kink dynamics by means of in situ transmission electron microscopy. This technique was unfortunately limited by surface roughness. However, in the case of ceramics, high-temperature annealing was found to produce inert and atomically smooth surfaces that survived ambient pressures. Suitable samples of 3C-type material were prepared here in order to image kinks by using the forbidden reflection method. By exploiting multi-slice simulations of 30º and 90° partial dislocations in Si, it was shown that not only the number of kinks along the dislocation core could be determined, but also their structure. It was shown that a recently proposed double-period reconstruction, along the 90° partial dislocation, could be easily verified experimentally by using convergent-beam electron diffraction.

Modelling of HREM and Nanodiffraction for Dislocation Kinks and Core Reconstruction. C.Koch, J.C.H.Spence, C.Zorman, M.Mehregany, J.Chung: Journal of Physics - Condensed Matter, 2000, 12[49], 10175-83