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14 декабря, 2021
The study of radiation effects on the structure and properties of materials started more than a century ago,1 but gained momentum from the development of fission reactors in the 1940s. In 1946, Wigner2 pointed out the possibility of a deleterious effect on material properties at high neutron fluxes, which was then confirmed experimentally.3 A decade later, Konobeevsky et al4 discovered irradiation creep in fissile metallic uranium, which was then observed in stainless steel.5 The discovery of void swelling in neutron-irradiated stainless steels in 1966 by Cawthorne and Fulton6 demonstrated that radiation effects severely restrict the lifetime ofreactor materials and that they had to be systematically studied.
The 1950s and early 1960s were very productive in studying crystalline defects. It was recognized that atoms in solids migrate via vacancies under thermal — equilibrium conditions and via vacancies and selfinterstitial atoms (SIAs) under irradiation; also that the bombardment with energetic particles generates high concentrations of defects compared to equilibrium values, giving rise to radiation-enhanced diffusion. Numerous studies revealed the properties of point defects (PDs) in various crystals. In particular, extensive studies of annealing of irradiated samples resulted in categorizing the so-called ‘recovery stages’ (e. g., Seeger7), which comprised a solid basis for understanding microstructure evolution under irradiation.
Already by this time, which was well before the discovery of void swelling in 1966, the process of interaction of various energetic particles with solid
targets had been understood rather well (e. g., Kinchin and Pease8 for a review). However, the primary damage produced was wrongly believed to consist of Frenkel pairs (FPs) only. In addition, it was commonly believed that this damage would not have serious long-term consequences in irradiated materials. The reasoning was correct to a certain extent; as they are mobile at temperatures of practical interest, the irradiation-produced vacancies and SIAs should move and recombine, thus restoring the original crystal structure. Experiments largely confirmed this scenario, most defects did recombine, while only about 1% or an even smaller fraction survived and formed vacancy and SIA-type loops and other defects. However small, this fraction had a dramatic impact on the microstructure of materials, as demonstrated by Cawthorne and Fulton.6 This discovery initiated extensive experimental and theoretical studies of radiation effects in reactor materials which are still in progress today.
After the discovery of swelling in stainless steels, it was found to be a general phenomenon in both pure metals and alloys. It was also found that the damage accumulation takes place under irradiation with any particle, provided that the recoil energy is higher than some displacement threshold value, £d, (^30-40 eV in metallic crystals). In addition, the microstructure of different materials after irradiation was found to be quite similar, consisting of voids and dislocation loops. Most surprisingly, it was found that the microstructure developed under irradiation with ~1 MeV electrons, which produces FPs only, is similar to that formed under irradiation with fast neutrons or heavy-ions, which produce more complicated primary damage (see Singh et a/.1). All this created an illusion that three-dimensional migrating (3D) PDs are the main mobile defects under any type of irradiation, an assumption that is the foundation of the initial kinetic models based on reaction rate theory (RT). Such models are based on a mean-field approximation (MFA) of reaction kinetics with the production of only 3D migrating FPs. For convenience, we will refer to these models as FP production 3D diffusion model (FP3DM) and henceforth this abbreviation will be used. This model was developed in an attempt to explain the variety of phenomena observed: radiation-induced hardening, creep, swelling, radiation-induced segregation (RIS), and second phase precipitation. A good introduction to this theory can be found, for example, in the paper by Sizmann,9 while a comprehensive overview was produced by Mansur,10 when its development was already completed. The theory is rather simple, but its general methodology can be useful in the further development of radiation damage theory (RDT). It is valid for ^1MeV electron irradiation and is also a good introduction to the modern RDT, see Section
Soon after the discovery of void swelling, a number of important observations were made, for example, the void super-lattice formation11-14 and the micrometer-scale regions of the enhanced swelling near grain boundaries (GBs).15 These demonstrated that under neutron or heavy-ion irradiation, the material microstructure evolves differently from that predicted by the FP3DM. First, the spatial arrangement of irradiation defects voids, dislocations, second phase particles, etc. is not random. Second, the existence of the micrometer-scale heterogeneities in the microstructure does not correlate with the length scales accounted for in the FP3DM, which are an order of magnitude smaller. Already, Cawthorne and Fulton6 in their first publication on the void swelling had reported a nonrandomness of spatial arrangement of voids that were associated with second phase precipitate particles. All this indicated that the mechanisms operating under cascade damage conditions (fast neutron and heavy-ion irradiations) are different from those assumed in the FP3DM. This evidence was ignored until the beginning of the 1990s, when the production bias model (PBM) was put forward by Woo and Singh.16,17 The initial model has been changed and developed significantly since then18-2 and explained successfully such phenomena as high swelling rates at low dislocation density (Section
1.13.6.2.2) , grain boundary and grain-size effects in void swelling, and void lattice formation (Section
1.13.6.2.3) . An essential advantage of the PBM over the FP3DM is the two features of the cascade damage: (1) the production of PD clusters, in addition to single PDs, directly in displacement cascades, and (2) the 1D diffusion of the SIA clusters, in addition to the 3D diffusion of PDs (Section 1.13.3). The PBM is, thus, a generalization of the FP3DM (and the idea of intracascade defect clustering introduced in the model by Bullough et a/. (BEK29)). A short overview of the PBM was published about 10 years ago.1 Here, it will be described somewhat differently, as a result of better understanding of what is crucial and what is not, see Section 1.13.6.
From a critical point of view, it should be noted that successful applications of the PBM have been limited to low irradiation doses (< 1 dpa) and pure metals (e. g., copper). There are two problems that prevent it from being used at higher doses. First, the PBM in its present form1 predicts a saturation of void size (see, e. g., Trinkaus et at19 and Barashev and Golubov30 and Section 1.13.6.3.1). This originates from the mixture of 1D and 3D diffusion-reaction kinetics under cascade damage conditions, hence from the assumption lying at the heart of the model. In contrast, experiments demonstrate unlimited void growth at high doses in the majority of materials and conditions (see, e. g., Singh et at.,31 Garner,32 Garner et at.,33 and Matsui et at.34). An attempt to resolve this contradiction was undertaken23,25,27 by including thermally activated rotations of the SIA-cluster Burgers vector; but it has been shown25 that this does not solve the problem. Thus, the PBM in its present form fails to account for the important and common observation: the indefinite void growth under cascade irradiation. The second problem of the PBM is that it fails to explain the swelling saturation observed in void lattices (see, e. g., Kulchinski et at.13). In contrast, it predicts even higher swelling rates in void lattices than in random void arrange — ments.25 This is because of free channels between voids along close-packed directions, which are formed during void ordering and provide escape routes for 1D migrating SIA clusters to dislocations and GBs, thus allowing 3D migrating vacancies to be stored in voids.
Resolving these two problems would make PBM self-consistent and complete its development. A solution to the first problem has recently been proposed by Barashev and Golubov35,36 (see Section 1.13.7). It has been suggested that one of the basic assumptions of all current models, including the PBM, that a random arrangement of immobile defects exists in the material, is correct at low and incorrect at high doses. The analysis includes discussion of the role of RIS and provides a solution to the problem, making the PBM capable of describing swelling in both pure metals and alloys at high irradiation doses. The solution for the second problem of the PBM mentioned above is the main focus of a forthcoming publication by Golubov et at.37
Because of limitations of space, we only give a short guide to the main concepts of both old and more recent models and the framework within which radiation effects, such as void swelling, and hardening and creep, can be rationalized. For the same reason, the impact of radiation on reactor fuel materials is not considered here, despite a large body of relevant experimental data and theoretical results collected in this area.
The effect of irradiation on materials is a classic example of an inherently multiscale phenomenon, as schematically illustrated in Figure 1. Pertinent processes span over more than 10 orders of magnitude in length scale from the subatomic nuclear to
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Defect
recombination, clustering, and migration Primary defect production and short-term annealing
Underlying
microstructure
(preexisting and evolving)
impacts defect and solute
fate
structural component level, and span 22 orders of magnitude in time from the subpicosecond of nuclear collisions to the decade-long component service lifetimes.1,2 Many different variables control the mix of nano/microstructural features formed and the corresponding degradation of physical and mechanical properties of nuclear fuels, cladding, and structural materials. The most important variables include the initial material composition and microstructure, the thermomechanical loads, and the irradiation history. While the initial material state and thermomechanical loading are of concern in all materials performance — limited engineering applications, the added complexity introduced by the effects of radiation is clearly the distinguishing and overarching concern for materials in advanced nuclear energy systems.
At the smallest scales, radiation damage is continually initiated by the formation of energetic primary knock-on atoms (PKAs) primarily through elastic collisions with high-energy neutrons. Concurrently, high concentrations of fission products (in fuels) and transmutants (in cladding and structural materials) are generated and can cause pronounced effects in the overall chemistry of the material, especially at high burnup. The PKAs, as well as recoiling fission products and transmutant nuclei quickly lose kinetic energy through electronic excitations (that are not generally believed to produce atomic defects) and a chain of atomic collision displacements, generating a cascade of vacancy and self-interstitial defects. High-energy displacement cascades evolve over very short times, 100 ps or less, and small volumes, with characteristic length scales of 50 nm or less, and are directly amenable to MD simulations if accurate potentials are available.
The physics of primary damage production in high-energy displacement cascades has been extensively studied with MD simulations.3-8 (see Chapter
1.11, Primary Radiation Damage Formation) The key conclusions from the MD studies of cascade evolution have been that (1) intracascade recombination of vacancies and self-interstitial atoms (SIAs) results in ^30% of the defect production expected from displacement theory, (2) many-body collision effects produce a spatial correlation (separation) of the vacancy and SIA defects, (3) substantial clustering of the SIAs and to a lesser extent the vacancies occur within the cascade volume, and (4) high-energy displacement cascades tend to break up into lobes or subcascades, which may also enhance recombination.4-7
Nevertheless, it is the subsequent diffusional transport and evolution of the defects produced during displacement cascades, in addition to solutes and transmutant impurities, that ultimately dictate radiation effects in materials and changes in material micro — structure.1, Spatial correlations associated with the displacement cascades continue to play an important role in much larger scales as do processes including defect recombination, clustering, migration, and gas and solute diffusion and trapping. Evolution of the underlying materials structure is thus governed by the time and temperature kinetics of diffusive and reactive processes, albeit strongly influenced by spatial correlations associated with the microstructure and the continuous production of new radiation damage.
The inherently wide range of time scales and the ‘rare-event’ nature of many of the controlling mechanisms make modeling radiation effects in materials extremely challenging and experimental characterization often unattainable. Indeed, accurate models of microstructure (point defects, dislocations, and grain boundaries) evolution during service are still lacking. To understand the irradiation effects and microstructure evolution to the extent required for a high fidelity nuclear materials performance model will require a combination of experimental, theoretical, and computational tools.
Furthermore, the kinetic processes controlling defect cluster and microstructure evolution, as well as the materials degradation and failure modes may not entirely be known. Thus, a substantial challenge is to discover the controlling processes so that they can be included within the models to avoid the detrimental consequences of in-service surprises. High performance computing can enable such discovery of class simulations, but care must also be taken to assess the accuracy of the models in capturing critical physical phenomena. The remainder of this chapter will thus focus on a description of KMC modeling, along with a few select examples of the application of KMC models to predict irradiation effects on materials and to identify opportunities for additional research to achieve the goal of accelerating the development of advanced computational approaches to simulate nucleation, growth, and coarsening of microstructure in complex engineering materials.
Whether it is the nonstoichiometry of fluorite — structure UO2±x or variable composition orthorhombic or tetragonal U-Zr alloy fuel, the accurate thermochemical description of these phases has
Diagram illustrating the computer coupling of phase diagrams and thermochemistry approach after Zinkevich.2
been through the use of solution models. Solid and liquid solution modeling from simple highly dilute systems to more complex interstitial and substitutional solutions with multiple lattices has been a rich field for some time, yet it is far from fully developed. To accurately describe the energetics of solutions will eventually require bridging atomistic models with the mesoscale treatments currently being used. Recent approaches have begun to deal with defect structures in phases, although only in a very constrained manner which limits clustering and other phenomena. Yet, when they are coupled with accurate data that allow fitting of the model parameters, the resulting representations have been highly predictive of phase relations and chemistry.
A number of texts provide useful descriptions of solution models from the simple to the complex.12-15 While there are several relatively accurate but rather intricate approaches, such as the cluster variation method, the discussion in this chapter is confined to
simpler models that are easily used in thermochemical equilibrium computational software and thus applicable to large, multicomponent systems of interest in nuclear fuels.
The simplest model is the ideal solution where the constituents are assumed to mix randomly with no structural constraints and no interactions (bonding or short — or long-range order). The standard Gibbs free energy and ideal mixing entropy contributions are
G° = X »<G?’
Gid = RT^2"j ln n, [8]
where G is the weighted sum of the standard Gibbs free energy for the constituents in the j phase solution, Gid is the contribution from the entropy increase due to randomly mixing the constituents, which is the configurational entropy, and R is the ideal gas law constant. For an ideal solution, the sum of the two represents the Gibbs free energy of the system.
In cases where there are significant interactions (bonding or repulsive interaction energies) among mixing constituents, an energetic term or terms need to be added to the solution free energy. The inclusion of a simple compositionally weighted excess energy term, Gex, accounts for the additional solution energy for what is historically termed a regular solution
Gex = XX XXEj [9
i=1 j>1
where X is the mole fraction and Ej the interaction energy between the components i and j. The system free energy is thus
G = G° + Gid + Gex [10]
Ab initio calculations have become a very powerful tool for RIS simulations. They have been shown to be able to provide not only the variation of the atomic jump frequencies with local concentration,125 but also new diffusion mechanisms.7 From a precise knowledge of the atomic jump frequencies and the recent development of diffusion models,98 a quantitative description of the flux coupling is expected to be feasible even in concentrated alloys. A unified description of flux coupling in dilute and concentrated alloys would allow the simultaneous prediction of two different mechanisms leading to RIS: solute drag by vacancies, and an IK effect involving the major elements.
An RIS segregation profile spreads over nanometers. Cell sizes of RIS continuous models are then too small for the theory of TIP to be valid. A mesoscale approach that includes interface energy between cells, such as the Cahn-Hilliard method, would be more appropriate. A derivation of quantitative phase field equations with fluctuations has recently been published.62 The resulting kinetic equations are dependent on the local concentration and also cell-size dependent. However, the diffusion mechanism involved direct exchanges between atoms. The same method needs to be developed for a system with point defect diffusion mechanisms.
Although it has been suggested since the first publications30 that the vacancy flux opposing the set up of RIS could slow down the void swelling, the change of microstructure and its coupling with RIS have almost never been modeled. Only very recently, phase field methods have tackled the kinetics of a concentration field and its interaction with a cavity population (see Chapter 1.15, Phase
Field Methods). The development of a simulation tool able to predict the mutual interaction between the point defect microstructure and the flux coupling is quite a challenge.
In the 1960s and 1970s, heavy ion irradiation was developed for the study of radiation damage processes in materials. As ion irradiation can be conducted at a well-defined energy, dose rate, and temperature, it results in very well-controlled experiments that are difficult to match in reactors. As such, interest grew in the use of ion irradiation for the purpose of simulating neutron damage in support of the breeder reactor program.1-3 Ion irradiation and simultaneous He injection were also used to simulate the effects of 14MeV neutron damage in conjunction with the fusion reactor engineering program. The application of ion irradiation (defined here as irradiation by any charged particle, including electrons) to the study of neutron irradiation damage caught the interest of the light water reactor community to address issues such as swelling, creep, and irradiation assisted stress corrosion cracking of core structural materials.4-6 Ion irradiation was also being used to understand the irradiated microstructure of reactor pressure vessel steels, Zircaloy fuel cladding, and materials for advanced reactor concepts.
There is significant incentive to use ion irradiation to study neutron damage as this technique has the potential for yielding answers on basic processes in addition to the potential for enormous savings in time and money. Neutron irradiation experiments are not amenable to studies involving a wide range of conditions, which is precisely what is required for investigations of the basic damage processes. Simulation by ions allows easy variation of the irradiation parameters such as dose, dose rate, and temperature over a wide range of values.
One of the prime attractions of ion irradiation is the rapid accumulation of end of life doses in short periods of time. Typical neutron irradiation experiments in thermal test reactors may accumulate damage at a rate of 3-5 dpayear-1. In fast reactors, the rates can be higher, on the order of 20 dpa year. For low dose components such as structural components in boiling water reactor (BWR) cores that typically have an end-of-life damage of 10 dpa, these rates are acceptable. However, even the higher dose rate of a fast reactor would require 4-5 years to reach the peak dose of ^80 dpa in the core baffle in a pressurized water reactor (PWR). For advanced, fast reactor concepts in which core components are expected to receive 200 dpa, the time for irradiation in a test reactor becomes impractical.
In addition to the time spent ‘in-core,’ there is an investment in capsule design and preparation as well as disassembly and allowing for radioactive decay, adding additional years to an irradiation program. Analysis of microchemical and microstructural changes by atom probe tomography (APT), Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) or microstructural changes by energy dispersive spectroscopy via scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM-EDS) and mechanical property or stress corrosion cracking (SCC) evaluation can take several additional years because of the precautions, special facilities, and instrumentation required for handling radioactive samples. The result is that a single cycle from irradiation through microanalysis and mechanical property/SCC testing may require over a decade. Such a long cycle length does not permit for iteration of irradiation or material conditions that is critical in any experimental research program. The long cycle time required for design and irradiation also reduces flexibility in altering irradiation programs as new data become available. The requirement of special facilities, special sample handling, and long irradiation time make the cost for neutron irradiation experiments very high.
In contrast to neutron irradiation, ion (heavy, light, or electrons) irradiation enjoys considerable advantages in both cycle length and cost. Ion irradiations of any type rarely require more than several tens of hours to reach damage levels in the 1-100 dpa range. Ion irradiation produces little or no residual radioactivity, allowing handling of samples without
the need for special precautions. These features translate into significantly reduced cycle length and cost. The challenge then is to verify the equivalency between neutron and ion irradiation in terms of the changes to the microstructure and properties of the material. The key question that needs to be answered is how do results from neutron and charged particle irradiation experiments compare? How, for example, is one to compare the results of a component irradiated in-core at 288 °C to a fluence of 1 x 1021n cm~ (E > 1 MeV) over a period of one year, with an ion irradiation experiment using 3 MeV protons at 400 °C to 1 dpa (displacements per atom) at a dose rate of 10~5dpas_1 (~1day), or 5MeV Ni2+ at 500°C to 10dpa at a dose rate of 5 x 10~3 dpas-1 (~1 h)?
The first question to resolve is the measure of radiation effect. In the Irradiation assisted stress corrosion cracking (IASCC) problem in LWRs, concern has centered on two effects of irradiation: radiation-induced segregation of major alloying elements or impurities to grain boundaries, which may cause embrittlement or enhance the intergranular stress corrosion cracking (IGSCC) process, and hardening of the matrix that results in localized deformation and embrittlement. The appropriate measure of the radiation effect in the former case would then be the alloy concentration at the grain boundary or the amount of impurity segregated to the grain boundary. This quantity is measurable by analytical techniques such as AES, APT, or STEM-EDS. For the latter case, the measure of the radiation effect would be the nature, size, density, and distribution of dislocation loops, black dots, and the total dislocation network, and how they impact the deformation of the alloy. Hence, specific and measurable effects of irradiation can be determined for both neutron and ion irradiation experiments.
The next concern is determining how ion irradiation translates into the environment describing neutron irradiation. That is, what are the irradiation conditions required for ion irradiation to yield the same measure of radiation effect as that for neutron irradiation? This is the key question, for in a postirradiation test program, it is only the final state of the material that determines equivalence, not the path taken. Therefore, if ion irradiation experiments could be devised that yielded the same measures of irradiation effects as observed in neutron irradiation experiments, the data obtained in postirradiation experiments will be equivalent. In such a case, ion irradiation experiments can provide a direct substitute for neutron irradiation. While neutron irradiation will always be required to qualify materials for reactor
application, ion irradiation provides a low-cost and rapid means of elucidating mechanisms and screening materials for the most important variables.
A final challenge is the volume of material that can be irradiated with each type of radiation. Neutrons have mean free paths on the order of centimeters in structural materials. One MeV electrons penetrate about 500 pm, 1 MeV protons penetrate about 10 pm, and 1 MeV Ni ions have a range of less than 1 pm. Thus, the volume of material that can be irradiated with ions from standard laboratory-sized sources (TEMs, accelerators), is limited.
Irradiation damage, especially cascade modeling, is usually preferentially dealt by larger scale methods such as molecular dynamics with empirical potentials rather than ab initio calculations. However, recently ab initio studies that directly tackle irradiation processes have appeared.
1.08.3.3.1 Threshold displacement energies
First, the increase in computer power has allowed the calculations of threshold displacement energies by ab initio molecular dynamics. We are aware of studies in GaN27 and silicon carbides.28,29 The procedure is the same as that with empirical potentials: one initiates a series of cascades of low but increasing energy and follows the displacement of the accelerated atom. The threshold energy is reached as soon as the atom does not return to its initial position at the end of the cascade. Such calculations are very promising as empirical potentials are usually imprecise for the orders of energies and interatomic distances at stake in threshold energies. However, they should be done with care as most pseudopotentials and basis sets are designed to work for moderate interatomic distances, and bringing two atoms too close to each other may lead to spurious results unless the pseudopotentials are specifically designed.
1.08.3.3.2 Electronic stopping power Second, recent studies have been published in the ab initio calculations of the electronic stopping power for high-velocity atoms or ions. The framework best suited to address this issue is time-dependent DFT (TD-DFT). Two kinds of TD-DFT have been applied to stopping power studies so far.
The first approach relies on the linear response of the system to the charged particle. The key quantity here is the density-density response function that measures how the electronic density of the solid reacts to a change in the external charge density. This observable is usually represented in reciprocal space and frequency, so it can be confronted directly with energy loss measurements. The density — density response function describes the possible excitations of the solid that channel an energy transfer from the irradiating particle to the solid. Most noticeably the (imaginary part of the) function vanishes for an energy lower than the band gap and shows a peak around the plasma frequency. Integrating this function over momentum and energy transfers, one obtains the electronic stopping power. Campillo, Pitarke, Eguiluz, and Garcia have implemented this approach and applied to some simple solids, such as aluminum or silicon.3 — They showed that there is little difference between the usual approximations of TD-DFT: the random phase approximation, which means basically no exchange correlation included, or adiabatic LDA, which means that the exchange correlation is local in space and instantaneous in time. The influence of the band structure of the solid accounts for noticeable deviations from the homogeneous electron gas model.
The second approach is more straightforward conceptually but more cumbersome technically. It proposes to simply monitor the slowing down of the charged irradiated particle in a large box in real space and real time. The response of the solid is hence not limited to the linear response: all orders are automatically included. However, the drawback is the size of the simulation box, which should be large enough to prevent interaction between the periodic images. Following this approach, Pruneda and coworkers33 calculated the stopping power in a large band gap insulator, lithium fluoride, for small velocities of the impinging particle. In the small velocity regime, the nonlinear terms in the response are shown to be important.
Unfortunately, whatever the implementation of TD-DFT in use, the calculations always rely on very crude approximations for the exchange-correlation effects. The true exchange-correlation kernel (the second derivative of the exchange-correlation energy with respect to the density) is in principle nonlocal (it is indeed long ranged) and has memory. The use of novel approximations of the kernel was recently introduced by Barriga-Carrasco but for homogeneous electron gas only.34,35
In practice, pair potentials are cut off at a certain range, which can have a surprising effect on stability as shown in Figure 1
While the LJ fluid is very well studied, the finite temperature crystal structure has only recently been resolved. The problem is that the fcc and hcp structures are extremely close in energy (see Figure 1(b)), so the entropy must be calculated extremely accurately.
This has been done by Jackson using ‘lattice — switch Monte Carlo3 (see Figure 2). The equivalent phase diagram for the Morse potential remains unsolved. The LJ potential has been used extensively for fcc materials, and it still comes as a surprise to many researchers that fcc is not the ground state.
The rationale for investigating the impact of free surfaces on cascade evolution is the existence of an influential body of experimental data provided by experiments in which thin foils are irradiated by high-energy electrons and/or heavy ions.98-106 In most cases, the experimental observations are carried out in situ by TEM and the results of MD simulations are in general agreement with the data from these experiments. For example, some material-to-material differences observed in the MD simulations, such as differences in in-cascade clustering between bcc iron and fcc copper, also appear in the experimental data.59,107,108 However, the yield of large point defect clusters in the simulations is lower than would be expected from the thin foil irradiations, particularly for vacancy clusters. It is desirable to investigate the source of this difference because of the influence this data has on our understanding of cascade damage formation.
Both simulations81,97,109,110 and experimental work105,106 indicate that the presence of a nearby free surface can influence primary damage formation. For example, interesting effects of foil thickness
have been observed in some experiments.105 Unlike cascades in bulk material, which produce vacancies and interstitials in equal numbers, the number of surviving vacancies in surface-influenced cascades can exceed the number of interstitials because of interstitial transport to the surface. This could lead to the formation of larger vacancy clusters and account for the differences in visible defect yield observed between the results of MD cascade simulations conducted in bulk material and the thin-film, in situ experiments. Initial modeling work reported by Nordlund and coworkers81 and Ghaly and Averback109 demonstrated the nature of effects that could occur, and Stoller and coworkers97,100 subsequently conducted a study involving a larger number of simulations at 10 and 20keV to determine the magnitude of the effects.
To carry out the simulations,97,100 a free surface was created on one face of a cubic simulation cell containing 250 000 atom sites. Atoms with sufficient kinetic energy to be ejected from the free surface (sputtered) were frozen in place just above the surface. Periodic boundary conditions are otherwise imposed. Two sets of nine 100 K simulations at 10keV were carried out to evaluate the effect of the free surface on cascade evolution. In one case, all the PKAs selected were surface atoms and, in the other, PKA were chosen from the atom layer 10a0 below the free surface. The PKA in eight 20keV, 100 K simulations were all surface atoms. Several PKA directions were used, with each of these directions slightly more than 10° off the [001] surface normal.
Figure 25 provides a representative example of a cascade initiated at the free surface. The peak damage state at 1.1 ps is shown in (a), with the final damage state at ~15 ps shown in (b). The large number of apparent vacancies and interstitials in
Figure 25(a) is due to the pressure wave from the cascade reaching the free surface. With the constraining force of the missing atoms removed, this pressure wave is able to displace the near-surface atoms by more than 0.3a0, which is the criterion used to choose atom locations to be displayed. As mentioned above, a similar pressure wave occurs in bulk cascades, making the maximum number of displaced atoms much greater than the final number of displacements. Most of these displacements are short-lived, as shown in Figure 26, in which the time dependence of the defect population is shown for three typical bulk cascades, one surface-initiated cascade, and one cascade initiated 10a0 below the surface. The effect of the pressure wave persists longer in surface-influenced cascades, and may contribute to stable defect formation.
The number of surviving point defects (normalized to NRT displacements) is shown in Figure 2 7 for both bulk and surface cascades, with error bars indicating the standard error of the mean. The results are similar at 10 and 20keV. Stable interstitial production in surface cascades is not significantly different than in bulk cascades; the mean value is slightly lower for the 10 keV surface cascades and slightly higher for the 20 keV case. However, there is a substantial increase in the number of stable vacancies produced, and the change is clearly significant. It is particularly worth noting that the number of surviving interstitials and vacancies is no longer equal for cascades initiated at the surface because interstitials can be lost by sputtering or the diffusion of interstitials and small glissile
interstitial clusters to the surface. Reducing the number of interstitials leads to a greater number of surviving vacancies, as less recombination can occur.
In-cascade clustering of interstitials is also relatively unchanged in the surface cascades (e. g., see Figures 4 and 5 in Stoller11 ). The effect on incascade vacancy clustering was more substantial. The vacancy clustering fraction per NRT (based on the fourth NN criterion discussed above) increased from ~-0.15 to 0.18 at 10 keV and from ^0.15 to 0.25 at 20 keV. Moreover, the vacancy cluster size distributions changed dramatically, with larger clusters produced in the surface cascades. The free surface effect on the vacancy cluster size distributions obtained at 20 keV bulk is shown in Figure 28. The largest vacancy cluster observed in the bulk cascades contained only six vacancies, while the surface cascades had clusters as large as 21 vacancies. This latter size is near the limit of visibility in TEM, with a diameter of almost 1.5 nm. Overall, these results imply that cascade defect production in bulk material is different from that observed in situ using TEM. More research such as that by Calder and coworkers111 is required to fully assess these phenomena, particularly for higher cascade energies, in order to improve the ability to make quantitative comparisons between simulations and experiments.
Consider 3D diffusion of mobile defects near a spherical cavity of radius R, which is embedded in a lossy-medium of the sink strength k2:
G — k2 D(C — Ceq) — VJ = 0 [46]
where Ceq is the thermal-equilibrium concentration of mobile defects and the defect flux is
J = — d(vC + kCrVtf) [47]
Here, D is the diffusion coefficient, U is the interaction energy of the defect with the void, kB is the Boltzmann constant, and T the absolute temperature. The boundary conditions for the defect concentration, C, at the void surface and at infinity are
C(R) = Ceq [48]
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