Damage profile and ion distribution of slow heavy ions in compounds

Abstract

Slow heavy ions inevitably produce a significant concentration of defects and lattice disorder in solids during their slowing-down process via ion-solid interactions. For irradiation effects research and many industrial applications, atomic defect production, ion range, and doping concentration are commonly estimated by the stopping and range of ions in matter (SRIM) code. In this study, ion-induced damage and projectile ranges of low energy Au ions in SiC are determined using complementary ion beam and microscopy techniques. Considerable errors in both disorder profile and ion range predicted by the SRIM code indicate an overestimation of the electronic stopping power, by a factor of 2 in most cases, in the energy region up to 25 keV/nucleon. Such large discrepancies are also observed for slow heavy ions, including Pt, Au, and Pb ions, in other compound materials, such as GaN, AlN, and SrTiO3. Due to the importance of these materials for advanced device and nuclear applications, better electronic stopping cross section predictions, based on a reciprocity principle developed by Sigmund, is suggested with fitting parameters for possible improvement.

HRXRD and Raman study of irradiation effects in InGaN/GaN layers induced by 2.3MeV Ne and 5.3MeV Kr ions

“…With increasing depth along the ion range, the electronic energy loss decreases, while the nuclear energy loss and the lattice damage due to elastic collisions increase and reach a maximum at the end of the ion range. In fact, due to possible ion-channeling effects induced by normal incidence and an overestimation of the electronic stopping power in the TRIM simulation [8], the peaks of the ion range curve, and the damage distribution in Fig. 1 should be closer to or at the interface of GaN/Al 2 O 3 .…”

The transformation balance between two types of structural defects in silica glass in ion-irradiation processes

“…The flux varied between 8 × 10 10 and 2.5 × 10 10 ions s − 1 cm − 2 depending on the energies of irradiation. Some studies pointed out that for slow heavy ions in light elemental targets or compound targets containing light elements, the SRIM calculation overestimates the electronic stopping power leading to the underestimation of range of incident ion [26,27]. Therefore, the projected range of Au ions at different energies was derived from reciprocity approach suggested by Sigmund [28].…”

M-line spectroscopic, spectroscopic ellipsometric and microscopic measurements of optical waveguides fabricated by MeV-energy N+ ion irradiation for telecom applications

“…The relatively large differences between the positions of the boundaries obtained by spectroscopic ellipsometric simulations, and that of the peak of the N + distribution cannot be attributed exclusively to the fact that SRIM overestimates stopping power [19,20]. It may be due to the convergence problems we experienced in the spectroscopic ellipsometric simulations.…”

“…distribution. This may be attributed to the fact that SRIM slightly overestimates stopping power, and consequently predicts lower ranges than the experimental ones [19,20].…”