How propagating dislocations leave stacking faults in a material (IMAGE)
Caption
A shock wave traveling through a material can create defects known as dislocations – tiny shifts in the material’s crystal that propagate through it, leaving what are known as stacking faults behind. At left, the regular arrangement of the material’s atoms is undisturbed. At right, dislocations have traveled from left to right through the material, creating a stacking fault (purple) where adjacent layers of the crystal don’t line up quite the way they should.
Credit
Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
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