Variable Dislocation Widths in Colloidal Crystals of Soft Thermosensitive Spheres

We report on detailed measurements of the core structure of Shockley partial dislocations in colloidal crystals. In crystalline arrays of micrometer sized thermosensitive particles, the interactions between the colloidal building blocks were tuned by changing the temperature. Individual dislocation cores were observed in a confocal microscope and their behavior as a function of temperature was studied. The obtained results qualitatively agree with the Peierls theory and are promising for further studies in which both Peierls stress and dislocation core width are measured simultaneously.