Screw dislocations in piezoelectric nanowires

In this article, we extend Eshelby's classic work (Eshelby, 1953) on screw dislocation in an elastic rod to the corresponding piezoelectric case. In our study the screw dislocation suffers a displacement jump and an electric potential jump across the slip plane, and the surface of the piezoelectric cylinder is traction-free and charge-free. Our results demonstrate that this extension is not trivial because under some conditions the screw dislocation cannot be ejected from the piezoelectric cylinder by applying an external torque to the cylinder and the stress–strain curve in torsion possesses a nonlinear region due to the movement of the screw dislocation. These observations are quite different than those predicted by Eshelby (1953) for the elastic rod case, and should be particularly interesting to piezoelectric nanowire structures involving Eshelby twist.