White microbeam diffraction from distorted crystals

We present a general description of white-beam (Laue) scattering from grains with dislocations. This approach is applied to examples with equal numbers of positive and negative Burger's vectors (paired) and with unpaired dislocations of one sign (geometrically necessary). We find that streaking of the Laue reflections is sensitive to both long-range geometrical rotations introduced by unpaired edge dislocations and to local rotation fluctuations introduced by the total number of dislocations (paired and unpaired). We demonstrate the technique by analyzing the dislocation distribution in a nanoindented Cu single crystal. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.