The annihilation by glide of prismatic loops in walls

Two mechanisms are conjectured for the non-diffusional refinement of prismatic dislocation loops. These mechanisms offer an alternative to the widely accepted concept of spontaneous disintegration below some critical dipole height. In one, a loop array is refined by reaction with a mobile dislocation having the same Burgers vector. Loop shrinkage then depends on the geometry of the array and on the position of the plane of incidence. In principle, any loop array can be refined via this mechanism provided that all the loops have the same sign. An alternative mechanism may take place in dense walls formed of randomly arranged dipolar loops of both signs. As the wall is densified by impacting dislocations that push pre-existing loops on their glide prism against each other, refinement occurs conservatively when two loops of opposite sign come into contact.