Mathematics

We study screw dislocations in an isotropic crystal undergoing antiplane shear.
In the framework of linear elasticity, by fixing a suitable boundary condition for the strain
(prescribed non-vanishing boundary integral), we manage to confine the dislocations inside the material. More precisely, in the presence of an external strain with circulation equal to n times the lattice spacing, it is energetically convenient to have n distinct dislocations lying inside the crystal. The novelty of introducing a Dirichlet boundary condition for the tangential strain is crucial to the confinement: it is well known that, if Neumann boundary conditions are imposed, the dislocations tend to migrate to the boundary. The results are achieved using PDE techniques and Ƭ-convergence theory, in the framework of the so-called core radius approach.