High Temperature Magneto-Elastic Instability of Dislocations in bcc Iron

Full text of publication follows: Density functional calculations show that the low temperature structure of self-interstitial defects in iron is fundamentally different from the structure of self-interstitial defects in all the other bcc metals. The origin of this anomaly is associated with the magnetic part of the cohesive energy of iron, where the Stoner exchange term stabilizes the body centred cubic phase, and where the magnetic part of energy is strongly affected by the large strain associated with the core region of an interstitial defect. At elevated temperatures magnetic excitations erode the stability of the bcc phase, giving rise to the gradual softening of the 110 transverse acoustic phonon modes and to the α-γ bcc-fcc martensitic phase transition occurring at 912 deg. C at normal pressure. Elastic moduli of bcc iron vary as a function of temperature with c' = (C11 - c12)/2 vanishing at the α-γ transition point. This has significant effects on the magnitude of both the elastic interactions between dislocations and other defects in the material and on the intrinsic structural stability of the dislocations and other defects themselves. To evaluate structural stability of defects at elevated temperatures we investigate elastic self-energies of dislocations in the continuum anisotropic elasticity approximation. We also develop atomistic models of dislocations and point defects based on a generalised form of the magnetic potential. By varying the magnetic part of the potential we are able to reproduce the experimentally observed variation of elastic moduli as a function of temperature, and assess relative stability of various types of defect structures. Our analysis shows that, in complete contrast to other straight dislocations, the elastic self-energy of straight 100 edge dislocations actually sharply decreases as we approach the α-γ transition, indicating that this surprising fact is a probable explanation of the frequent observation of the 100 type interstitial edge dislocation loops in ferromagnetic bcc iron. (authors)