Long-ranged stress field produced by a planar assembly of edge dislocations: the effect of disorder

Abstract We consider the stress field induced by a planar assembly of edge dislocations. If these dislocations are periodically arranged, the stress field which they produce decreases exponentially with increasing distance from the wall. We show that in this case, disorder is a singular perturbation which leads to fluctuations of the stress field with a power-law dependence. Other physical examples where this mechanism operates are briefly mentioned.