Cooperative effect of electronic and nuclear stopping on ion irradiation damage in silica

Radiation damage by ions is conventionally believed to be produced either by displacement cascades or electronic energy deposition acting separately. There is, however, a range of ion energies where both processes are significant and can contribute to irradiation damage. The combination of two computational methods, namely binary collision approximation and molecular dynamics, the latter with input from the inelastic thermal spike model, makes it possible to examine the simultaneous contribution of both energy deposition mechanisms on the structural damage in the irradiated structure. We study the effect in amorphous SiO₂ irradiated by Au ions with energies ranging between 0.6 and 76.5 MeV. We find that in the intermediate energy regime, the local heating due to electronic excitations gives a significant contribution to the displacement cascade damage.