Differences in the accumulation of ion-beam damage in Ni and NiFe explained by atomistic simulations

Laurent Karim Béland, German D. Samolyuk, Roger E. Stoller

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

34 Scopus citations

Abstract

Following low-dose irradiation with a 3 MeV beam of Au ions, i.e. less than one displacement per atom, a lower number of defects were experimentally observed in NiFe than in pure Ni. At higher doses, more damage is observed in NiFe than in pure Ni. Also, at these high doses, defect structures are observed deep in the material, far from the region where ions are implanted, more so in Ni than in NiFe. In this study, these experimental results are explained using atomistic modeling. Sequences of overlapping displacement cascades with intervening defect aging are simulated. Evidence is provided that nanosecond aging at 900 K can be used as a surrogate for long-time, room-temperature aging. Then, using this procedure, it is shown that the low defect diffusivity of NiFe leads to less aggregation and recombination events between each displacement cascade in a given volume than in Ni. Variations in the local defect chemistry in NiFe produces a broad spectrum of defect formation energy, leading to the trapping of defects at energetically favorable sites: this explains the low defect diffusivity. Also, this low diffusivity explains why, at high dose, defects in NiFe do not propagate as deeply in the material than in pure Ni.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)415-420
Number of pages6
JournalJournal of Alloys and Compounds
Volume662
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 25 2016

Funding

This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan ). This work was supported as part of the Energy Dissipation to Defect Evolution (EDDE), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences . LKB acknowledges additional support from a fellowship awarded by the Fonds Québécois de recherche Nature et Technologies . We thank Alexandre Barachev, Ke Jin, and Raina Olsen for insightful discussions.

Keywords

  • Atomistic modelling
  • Concentrated alloy
  • Iron
  • Nickel
  • Radiation damage

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