Figure 1

Structures of the $C14$ Laves phase and a stacking fault of it. (a) Model of the $C14$ structure viewed along the [11-20] and [0001] directions, respectively. The $\alpha c\beta$-type triple layers are separated by single layers of kagome network. (b) High-resolution transmission electron micrograph (HRTEM) of an undeformed $C14$ Laves phase viewed along the [11-20] direction, recorded with the aberration-corrected high-resolution transmission electron microscope. (c) An HRTEM image of a stacking fault in the deformed $C14$ Laves phase.Reuse & Permissions

Figure 2

(a) An aberration-corrected HRTEM image of the partial dislocation. The closure failure of the Burgers circuit implies that the dislocation has a Burgers vector, ${\mathbf{b}}_1$, of $⟨-1100⟩/3$ and moves from right to left. The simulated image of the stacking fault is shown as an inset with a thickness of 2.4 nm and a focus value of 9 nm. (b) A magnified image of the dislocation core shown in the red box in (a).Reuse & Permissions

Figure 3

Results of the NEB calculation for the slip process. (a) Side view of the atomic configurations (1)–(5) during the slip, which contains a crystallographic slip in plane 1 and an atomic shuffling in the triple layer. (b) Top view of the atomic configurations during the slip. The blue path denotes the movement of Nb from the site $\alpha$ to $\gamma$, and the red path denotes the motion of Cr from $c$ to $a$. The shuffling occurs from the configuration (2) to (4). (c) Top view of the crystallographic slip, showing the moving direction of the kagome layer $A$ relative to the layer α below it. (d) A comparison between the calculated and experimental results. The upper two images are the simulated ones for the configurations (2) and (4). The lower two are the corresponding experimental images, which are from the center and from the right side of the dislocation core, respectively. (e) Energy profiles for different slip mechanisms. The undulating slip has a path with the lowest energy.Reuse & Permissions

Figure 4

Results of the strain field analysis. (a) ${\epsilon }_{xx}$ strain map obtained from an experimental HRTEM image of the dislocation by the LADIA method. The triangle denotes the center of the dislocation core and circles mark the location of measurements shown in Fig. 4b with distances of 1.5 nm (solid line) and 2.5 nm (dotted line), respectively, from the core. (b) Angular variation of strain fields measured experimentally and calculated with the Foreman model.Reuse & Permissions