DISLOCATION nucleation from a stressed crack tip is analyzed based on the Peierls concept. A periodic relation between shear stress and atomic shear displacement is assumed to hold along the most highly stressed slip plane emanating from a crack tip. This allows some small slip displacement to occur near the tip in response to small applied loading and, with increase in loading, the incipient dislocation configuration becomes unstable and leads to a fully formed dislocation which is driven away from the crack. An exact solution for the loading at that nucleation instability is developed via the J-integral for the case when the crack and slip planes coincide, and an approximate solution is given when they do not. Solutions are also given for emission of dissociated dislocations, especially partial dislocation pairs in fcc crystals. The level of applied stress intensity factors required for dislocation nucleation is shown to be proportional to unroofed-radical gamma(us)BAR where gamma(us), the unstable stacking energy, is a new solid state parameter identified by the analysis. It is the maximum energy encountered in the block-like sliding along a slip plane, in the Burgers vector direction, of one half of a crystal relative to the other. Approximate estimates of gamma(us) are summarized and the results are used to evaluate brittle vs ductile response in fcc and bcc metals in terms of the competition between dislocation nucleation and Griffith cleavage at a crack tip. The predictions seem compatible with known behavior and also show that in many cases solids which are predicted to first cleave under pure mode I loading should instead first emit dislocations when that loading includes very small amounts of mode II and III shear. The analysis in this paper also reveals a feature of the near-tip slip distribution corresponding to the saddle point energy configuration for cracks that are loaded below the nucleation threshold, as is of interest for thermal activation.
