Fastest Dislocations ever Observed!

Our paper was published today that showed the first experimental demonstration that dislocations can move faster than the speed of sound!

It has been debated for ~70 years whether dislocations can exceed the speed of sound, as the energy should approach infinity at the sonic velocity. While it has been proposed that dislocations could move faster than the sound speed if initially generated at that velocity, no experiment has been able to observe this -- leaving the theory unvalidated and much unknown about how the interactions of those defects change under these extreme conditions.

First author, Kento Katagiri, used SACLA's X-ray Free Electron Laser to collect the first experimental data showing dislocations in diamond move faster than the sound speed -- for the first time demonstrating this new velocity regime for dislocation science!

Check out the paper here: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adh5563

Our work was also featured in a Science Perspectives article by Marcus D. Knudson and Christopher T. Seagle: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk4420, and by the SLAC Press Office: https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2023-10-05-groundbreaking-study-shows-defects-spreading-through-diamond-faster-speed-sound