Alloy destabilization by dislocations

Thermodynamic phase diagrams of alloys are usually computed or experimentally determined under the assumption of perfect crystallinity of the material. Here, we show that dislocations can change the phase stability of alloys and increase the size of the miscibility gap. This dislocation-induced destabilization of the alloy originates from an interaction between the elastic fields of the dislocations and those due to composition variations. We predict that the characteristic time scale for the growth of compositional fluctuations depends inversely on the dislocation mobility.