The force on a dislocation near a weakly bonded interface

The physical system being studied here is an elastic dislocation in proximi ty to a material interface which has limited strength in shear. The configu ration is relevant to elastic strain relaxation in bonded thin-film semicon ductor material structures. A plane strain boundary Value problem is formul ated and an exact solution for the force on the dislocation versus distance from the interface is obtained. If the dislocation is close enough to the interface, its stress field causes irreversible slip across the interface. This slip, in turn, induces an attractive force on the dislocation. For the case of an edge dislocation with Burgers vector normal to the interface, i t is found that the dislocation has a stable equilibrium position at a smal l distance from the interface.