Fig. 2: Dislocation core trajectory, dissociation direction and glide direction.

a The example trajectory of a dislocation core obtained by the MD simulation at 500 K for 2 ns. The blue, red and green points denote the positions where the core structures are P, π and B, respectively. The inset shows that the P/B cores and the π cores should be distributed on alternating P planes. b Temporal evolution of the core dissociation direction θ extracted from the same MD simulation. c Distribution of θ at the temperature ranging from 300 K to 900 K. The horizontal lines denote the boundaries we defined to distinguish the core structures at 500 K. d–f Distributions of the deviation of the glide direction ϕ away from the dissociation direction θ for the B, π and P cores. g–j The differences of the α_zz maps at two moments, corresponding to the four dislocation core glide events observed in the simulation. The blue/red “+” symbol indicates the core position in the previous/next moment.