Metadislocation arrangements in the complex metallic alloy ξ'-Al-Pd-Mn

In the present work different types of metadislocation arrangements are studied. It is shown that metadislocations can form dipoles or dissociate into partials, which leads to a decrease of the elastic line energy. Connected groups of metadislocations can assume large and complex network structures. Although the local elastic strain at the individual metadislocation cores remains small, they posses large total Burgers vectors and are highly effective means of plastic deformation. Furthermore, we present a characterization of phase boundaries built up by regular metadislocation arrays and show that these metadislocations almost fully compensate the lattice mismatch.