O. Yu. Kontsevoi

Electronic mechanism of impurity-dislocation interactions in intermetallics: NiAl

The nature of impurity-dislocation interactions is one of the key questions governing the strength and plasticity of solid-solution materials. To investigate the influence of impurities on the mechanical properties of intermetallic NiAl, the electronic structure and energy of NiAl with a <100>{010} edge dislocation and transition-metal impurities was calculated using the real-space tight-binding linear muffin-tin orbital method. The localized electronic states, appearing in the core of the dislocation, are found to lead to strong impurity-dislocation interactions via two mechanisms: firstly, chemical locking, due to strong hybridization between impurity electronic states and dislocation localized states; secondly, electrostatic locking, due to long-range charge oscillations caused by the electron localization in the dislocation core. The results obtained explain qualitatively why the solid-solution hardening effect in NiAl correlates with the electronic structure of impurities rather than with size misfit, as expected according to traditional views.

Interactions of point and extended defects in structural intermetallics: real-space LMTO-recursion calculations

A real-space TB-LMTO-recursion method for electronic structure calculations is applied to the study of interacting extended and point defects in NiAl. Results of calculations for the pure intermetallic and with ternary additions (within a supercell model) show good agreement with band structure results. Further, electronic structure and total energy calculations of point (single impurity, M=Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe and Co) and planar defects such as anti-phase boundaries (APB) were carried out and the interaction between them was determined. We found that for the ½〈111〉{110} APB in NiAl, ternary additions occupy exclusively the 3d-metal sublattice and decrease the APB energy (except for Co). Finally, we employ TB-LMTO-REC to study the electronic structure of the most complex extended defect, a dislocation. We demonstrate for the 〈100〉{010} edge dislocation in NiAl that: (i) quasi-localized states may exist as a result of specific lattice distortions in the dislocation core with a type of “broken” bonds; (ii) the electronic structure changes appreciably in the process of dislocation motion; (iii) van-Hove singularities present in the ideal crystal may be shifted to E;r as a result of the dipolar character of the deformations in the dislocation core.