Flexible Ab initio boundary conditions: simulating isolated dislocations in bcc Mo and Ta

We report the first ab initio density-functional study of the strain field and Peierls stress of isolated <111> screw dislocations in bcc Mo and Ta. The local dislocation strain field is self-consistently coupled to the long-range elastic field using a flexible boundary condition method. This reduces the mesoscopic atomistic calculation to one involving only degrees of freedom near the dislocation core. The predicted equilibrium core for Mo is significantly different from previous atomistic results and the Peierls stress shows significant non-Schmid behavior as expected for the bcc metals.