Samuel A. Briggs

The effects of irradiation on 3C-silicon carbide (SiC) and amorphous SiC (a-SiC) are investigated using both in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and complementary molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The single ion strikes identified in the in situ TEM irradiation experiments, utilizing a 1.7 MeV Au3+ ion beam with nanosecond resolution, are contrasted to MD simulation results of the defect cascades produced by 10–100 keV Si primary knock-on atoms (PKAs). The MD simulations also investigated defect structures that could possibly be responsible for the observed strain fields produced by single ion strikes in the TEM ion beam irradiation experiments. Both MD simulations and in situ TEM experiments show evidence of radiation damage in 3C-SiC but none in a-SiC. Selected area electron diffraction patterns, based on the results of MD simulations and in situ TEM irradiation experiments, show no evidence of structural changes in either 3C-SiC or a-SiC.

We present kilohertz-scale video capture rates in a transmission electron microscope, using a camera normally limited to hertz-scale acquisition. An electrostatic deflector rasters a discrete array of images over a large camera, decoupling the acquisition time per subframe from the camera readout time. Total-variation regularization allows features in overlapping subframes to be correctly placed in each frame. Moreover, the system can be operated in a compressive-sensing video mode, whereby the deflections are performed in a known pseudorandom sequence. Compressive sensing in effect performs data compression before the readout, such that the video resulting from the reconstruction can have substantially more total pixels than that were read from the camera. This allows, for example, 100 frames of video to be encoded and reconstructed using only 15 captured subframes in a single camera exposure. We demonstrate experimental tests including laser-driven melting/dewetting, sintering, and grain coarsening of nanostructured gold, with reconstructed video rates up to 10 kHz. The results exemplify the power of the technique by showing that it can be used to study the fundamentally different temporal behavior for the three different physical processes. Both sintering and coarsening exhibited self-limiting behavior, whereby the process essentially stopped even while the heating laser continued to strike the material. We attribute this to changes in laser absorption and to processes inherent to thin-film coarsening. In contrast, the dewetting proceeded at a relatively uniform rate after an initial incubation time consistent with the establishment of a steady-state temperature profile.

Palladium can readily dissociate molecular hydrogen at its surface, and rapidly accept it onto the octahedral sites of its face-centered cubic crystal structure. This can include radioactive tritium. As tritium β-decays with a half-life of 12.3 years, He-3 is generated in the metal lattice, causing significant degradation of the material. Helium bubble evolution at high concentrations can result in blister formation or exfoliation and must therefore be well understood to predict the longevity of materials that absorb tritium. A hydrogen over-pressure must be applied to palladium hydride to prevent hydrogen from desorbing from the metal, making it difficult to study tritium in palladium by methods that involve vacuum, such as electron microscopy. Recent improvements in in-situ ion implantation Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) allow for the direct observation of He bubble nucleation and growth in materials. In this work, we present results from preliminary experiments using the new ion implantation Environmental TEM (ETEM) at the University of Huddersfield to observe He bubble nucleation and growth, in-situ, in palladium at cryogenic temperatures in a hydrogen environment. After the initial nucleation phase, bubble diameter remained constant throughout the implantation, but bubble density increased with implantation time. β-phase palladium hydride was not observed to form during the experiments, likely indicating that the cryogenic implantation temperature played a dominating role in the bubble nucleation and growth behavior.

Understanding radiation damage in crystalline systems at the atomic scale is essential for the development of multi-scale predictive models for advancing nuclear science and engineering applications. State-of-the-art techniques used for investigating irradiation effects include molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, which can provide attosecond resolution of damage cascades over picosecond time scales, and in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM), which can provide millisecond resolution in real-time. In this work, MD simulations and in situ TEM ion beam irradiation of crystalline TiO2 with 46 keV Ti1− ions are performed and results are compared. The MD results show that the ratio of the titanium to oxygen defects evolves during the radiation cascade. The vacancies are produced mostly in the core, while self-interstitials are concentrated at the periphery of the cascade. Cluster analysis of the MD results confirms the formation of a void (or a cluster of vacancies) that contains as much as ≈10 000 vacancies in the ballistic phase, compared to <1000 after annealing. The radial distribution functions and the simulated selected area electron diffraction patterns at the peak of the ballistic phase confirm the existence of a short-range order and medium-range order throughout the simulation. However, the long-range order reemerges after annealing of the cascade event in agreement with the in situ TEM ion beam irradiation experiments. The MD simulations and the experiments show no indication of amorphization.