Modelling of HREM and nanodiffraction for dislocation kinks and core reconstruction

The ability to directly image individual dislocation kinks opens up many possibilities for the study of kink dynamics by in situ TEM. Unfortunately, this technique is limited by surface roughness. For ceramics, however, high temperature annealing has been found to produce inert and atomically smooth surfaces that even survive ambient pressures. We have prepared such samples of 3C-SiC, in order to image kinks by the forbidden reflections method. Using multislice simulations for 30 and 90° partial dislocations in Si we show that not only the number of kinks along the dislocation core can be determined, but also their structure assuming an aberration corrected TEM. We also show how the recently proposed double period reconstruction along the 90° partial dislocation in Si can easily be verified experimentally using convergent beam electron diffraction.