Abstract

The properties of prismatic dislocation loops, generated by radiation in metals, have remained elusive for decades, and recent advances in computational capabilities as well as transmission electron microscopy have renewed interest in their study. Acoustic and elastic waves could become an interesting, nonintrusive, probe to this end, as they have for other dislocation configurations. What then are the characteristics of elastic wave scattering that would be sensitive to a prismatic loop signature? In this paper, we report the scattering cross section for an elastic wave by a prismatic dislocation loop. It differs in significant ways from the analog quantity in the case of pinned dislocation segments, the most significant being the polarization of the scattered wave. The properties of a coherent wave traveling through an elastic medium filled with randomly placed and randomly oriented such loops are also reported. At long wavelengths, the effective wave velocity and attenuation coefficients resemble those for a similar case with pinned dislocation segments. © 2009 American Institute of Physics.