Giant enhancement of material damage associated to electronic excitation during ion irradiation: The case of LiNbO₃

Abstract

The structural damage induced by ion irradiation on dielectric materials and associated device degradation has been, so far, explained on the basis of collisional processes mostly ignoring the electronic excitation. Recent work, focused on lithium niobate, offers conclusive evidence that at high ion energy and moderate mass (A ≥ 15) electronic excitation may induce a giant enhancement over the damage rate due to nuclear collisions. As a consequence the material becomes amorphized at irradiation fluences far below those required for nuclear collisions alone. These results are expected to have a deep impact on many technologies including storage of radioactive waste, radiation‐resistant materials for fusion reactors, lifetime of components and devices in space missions, nano‐patterning in electronics and photonics, and possibly heavy‐ion therapy in medicine. (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

Ion Irradiation Studies of Soft Magnetic Metallic Glasses

“…A deeper discussion on physical aspects of radiation damage caused by light and heavy ions can be found in Ref. [7].…”

Kinetics of amorphization induced by swift heavy ions in α-quartz

“…Out of these two contributions, the nuclear damage and amorphization has been extensively studied [8][9][10][11], whereas damage in the electronic stopping regime is still poorly understood. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the relaxation of the high electronic excitation associated with S e plays a fundamental role in the ion-beam induced damage and the subsequent amorphization process [12,13], at least in the case of dielectric materials. It has been widely documented that the impacts of swift heavy ions (where the electronic stopping regime dominates) on several dielectric targets generate individual tracks along the trajectory, whenever a certain threshold stopping power is overcome [14][15][16].…”

Influence of Annealing and Irradiation by Heavy Ions on Optical Absorption of Doped Lithium Niobate Crystals

“…The lattice damage can be also induced by elastic nuclear collisions and implantation [28,29]. For example, damage induced defects by ion irradiations in lithium niobate were observed for swift (GeV range) 112 Sn, 155 Gd, and 238 U ions with fluences extending not below 10 10 cm −2 for the high electronic stopping power (dE/dx) e , between 18 and 40 keV nm −1 [30].…”