Low temperature regime: mobile SIAs, immobile vacancies (Stage I

Between recovery Stage I and Stage III, the SIA point defects and small SIA clusters have sufficient mobil­ity to migrate and form visible dislocation loops as well as recombine with sessile monovacancies and vacancy clusters. The defect accumulation in this temperature regime is initially linear with dose when the defect concentration is too low for
uncorrelated recombination to be a significant con­tribution, but then transitions to a square root depen­dence at an intermediate dose in pure materials when interaction between defects from different PKA

events becomes important.6,70-72,90 The critical dose

for this kinetic transition is dependent on the con­centration of other defect sinks in the lattice (disloca­tions, grain boundaries, precipitates, etc.). The high sink strength associated with the immobile vacancies limits the growth rate (i. e., size) of the SIA loops for doses above ^0.1 dpa, and the observable defect clus­ter size and density typically approach a constant value at higher doses. Figure 8 shows an example of the microstructure of AlN following ion irradiation at 80 K (mobile SIAs, immobile vacancies) to a damage level of about 5 dpa.91 The microstructure consists of small (<5 nm diameter) interstitial dislocation loops.