Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2016
Dislocations are line like crystal defects mediating plasticity in single crystals. In the current contribution we review classical continuum concepts of dislocation theory from a topological view point. Subsequently, we introduce a new measure for the density of jogs mutually impaired on each other by dislocations on different slip systems. This jog density is closely related to a topological measure of the interlinkage of the dislocations on the involved slip systems, known as relative helicity in other branches of physics.