Sixty years of dislocations

It is well-known that with the appearance of three independent papers by Taylor, Polanyi and Orowan in the year 1934, the concept of crystal dislocations was born. Since then, dislocation theory has had many spectacular successes. It is quite appropriate therefore to be aware of the state of development of this exciting subject, sixty years after its discovery. A flavour for the vast subject of the applications of dislocation mechanisms to real materials is presented by choosing three examples, one each, drawn from metallurgy, physics and electronics. The topic of ‘Strength of metals and alloys’ is the first one, as this is also the author’s area of research. The phenomenon of solidification and crystal growth forms the next topic, especially in view of the seminal contributions made by A R Verma and his school from India. Dislocations play a useful role in the strengthening of solids, but how influential are they in affecting the performance of modern semiconductor devices? In the third example, the interesting and painstaking work done to settle this question is reviewed. Can we regard carbon fibre as thetransistor of dislocation theory? How shall we understand the long-established effects such as corrosion-fatigue, superplasticity and shape memory as well as the electrochemical and electro-mechanical properties of dislocations in semiconductor and non-metallic crystals? Answers to these questions belong to the realms of the future developments in dislocations. The talk is concluded with a discussion of these topics.