Breather mechanism of the void ordering in crystals under irradiation

Abstract

The void ordering has been observed in very different radiation environments ranging from metals to ionic crystals. In the present paper the ordering phenomenon is considered as a consequence of the energy transfer along the close packed directions provided by self-focusing discrete breathers. The self-focusing breathers are energetic, mobile and highly localized lattice excitations that propagate great distances in atomic-chain directions in crystals. This points to the possibility of atoms being ejected from the void surface by the breather-induced mechanism, which is similar to the focuson-induced mechanism of vacancy emission from voids proposed in our previous paper. The main difference between focusons and breathers is that the latter are stable against thermal motion. There is evidence that breathers can occur in various crystals, with path lengths ranging from 104 to 107 unit cells. Since the breather propagating range can be larger than the void spacing, the voids can shield each other from breather fluxes along the close packed directions, which provides a driving force for the void ordering. Namely, the vacancy emission rate for “locally ordered” voids (which have more immediate neighbors along the close packed directions) is smaller than that for the “interstitial” ones, and so they have some advantage in growth. If the void number density is sufficiently high, the competition between them makes the “interstitial” voids shrink away resulting in the void lattice formation. The void ordering is intrinsically connected with a saturation of the void swelling, which is shown to be another important consequence of the breather-induced vacancy emission from voids.