Insights into electron wind force by a helical dislocation reconfiguration

Chang Zhou; Lihua Zhan; Chunhui Liu; Minghui Huang

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.106870

Insights into electron wind force by a helical dislocation reconfiguration

iScience. 2023 May 12;26(6):106870. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.106870. eCollection 2023 Jun 16.

Authors

Chang Zhou¹, Lihua Zhan^{1

2

3}, Chunhui Liu^{2

3}, Minghui Huang^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Precision Manufacturing for Extreme Service Performance, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China.
³ Light Alloys Research Institute, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China.

Abstract

Many efforts for decades have been made to explore electron wind force, produced by electric current itself under electropulsing treatment. However, the clear evidence of this force is hard to separate from Joule heating. Here we study a helical dislocation within quenched Al-Cu-Li alloy when subjected to a pulsed current. Such a helical configuration is quite suited for uncoupling this force from Joule heating effect because, contrary to general dislocations, it can take a unique reconfiguration under a driving force parallel to its Burgers vector. We find that within the pulsed samples, an initial helix happens to reconfigure, evolving into a line morphology. Therefore, it is this electron wind force F_ew, which parallel to the Burgers vector, would result in such novel helix reconfiguration when compared to the absence of this force. This is the first study to verify electron wind force by a helical dislocation reconfiguration.

Keywords: Condensed matter physics; Electromagnetics; Materials property.