This work presents a coarse-grained atomistic study of the effect of phonons on the mobility of edge dislocations. A variety of phenomena, including phonon focusing and phonon-induced"dislocation drag, are reproduced in the simulations. Results show that interaction with phonons slows down the dislocations and phonon focusing results in the arrest of dislocations. A wavelet analysis, together with visualization, reveals that the phonon-dislocation interaction leads to a reduction of the energy associated with the dislocation core, with some energy lagging behind the decelerated dislocation or dispersed around the arrested dislocation through emission of secondary phonon waves, thus clarifying the underlying physics. (C) 2017 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.