Dislocation nucleation is essential to our understanding of plastic deformation, ductility, and mechanical strength of crystalline materials. Molecular dynamics simulation has played an important role in uncovering the fundamental mechanisms of dislocation nucleation, but its limited timescale remains a significant challenge for studying nucleation at experimentally relevant conditions. Here we show that dislocation nucleation rates can be accurately predicted over a wide range of conditions by determining the activation free energy from umbrella sampling. Our data reveal very large activation entropies, which contribute a multiplicative factor of many orders of magnitude to the nucleation rate. The activation entropy at constant strain is caused by thermal expansion, with negligible contribution from the vibrational entropy. The activation entropy at constant stress is significantly larger than that at constant strain, as a result of thermal softening. The large activation entropies are caused by anharmonic effects, showing the limitations of the harmonic approximation widely used for rate estimation in solids. Similar behaviors are expected to occur in other nucleation processes in solids. N ucleation plays an important role in a wide range of physical, chemical, and biological processes (1-6). In the last two decades, the nucleation of dislocations in crystalline solids has attracted significant attention, not only for the reliability of microelectronic devices (7), but also as a responsible mechanism for incipient plasticity in nanomaterials (8-10) and nanoindentation (11-13). However, predicting the nucleation rate as a function of temperature and stress from fundamental physics is extremely difficult. Because the critical nucleus can be as small as a few lattice spacings, the applicability of continuum theory (14) becomes questionable. At the same time, the timescale of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations is about ten orders of magnitude smaller than the experimental timescale. Hence MD simulations of dislocation nucleation are limited to conditions at which the nucleation rate is extremely high (15,16).One way to predict the dislocation nucleation rate under common experimental loading rates (17) is to combine the transition state theory (TST) (5, 18) and the nudged elastic band (NEB) method (19). TST predicts that the nucleation rate per nucleation site in a crystal subjected to constant strain γ can be written aswhere F c is the activation free energy, T is temperature, and k B is Boltzmann's constant. The frequency prefactor is ν 0 ¼ k B T∕h, where h is Planck's constant. Note that F c ðT;γÞ ¼ E c ðγÞ − TS c ðγÞ, where E c and S c are the activation energy and activation entropy, respectively. Here we assume the dependence of E c and S c on T is weak, which is later confirmed numerically for T ≤ 400 K. For a crystal subjected to constant stress σ, F c ðT;γÞ in Eq. 1 should be replaced by the activation Gibbs free energy G c ðT;σÞ ¼ H c ðσÞ− TS c ðσÞ, where H c is the activation enthalpy. Because the NE...