Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 10, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-09815-5
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Funding
- US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering, the Physical Behavior of Materials Program [DE-FG02-01ER45871]
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
- Laboratory Directed Research and Development program
- US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration [DE-NA0003525]
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Tetradymite-structured chalcogenides such as bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3) are of significant interest for thermoelectric energy conversion and as topological insulators. Dislocations play a critical role during synthesis and processing of such materials and can strongly affect their functional properties. The dislocations between quintuple layers present special interest since their core structure is controlled by the van der Waals interactions between the layers. In this work, using atomic-resolution electron microscopy, we resolve the basal dislocation core structure in Bi2Te3, quantifying the disregistry of the atomic planes across the core. We show that, despite the existence of a stable stacking fault in the basal plane gamma surface, the dislocation core spreading is mainly due to the weak bonding between the layers, which leads to a small energy penalty for layer sliding parallel to the van der Waals gap. Calculations within a semidiscrete variational Peierls-Nabarro model informed by first-principles calculations support our experimental findings.
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