Abstract

The paper reports on the recovery of irradiation-induced defects in thin aluminium films as studied by measurements of the electrical 1/f noise. The defects are produced by irradiation with 1 MeV electrons at 10 K, which results in a strong increase of the noise. Subsequent isochronal annealing at progressively higher temperatures causes the 1/f noise measured at 10 K to recover in discrete steps which occur at the same temperatures as the well-known recovery stages of the irradiation-induced electrical resistivity increase. In the noise measurements at 40 K, however, an additional recovery step without analogue in the recovery spectrum of the electrical resistivity is observed at 70 K. The temperature dependence and annealing behaviour of the 1/f noise may be understood in terms of thermally activated motion of defects in a distorted lattice potential. A microscopic explanation of the present observation as well as of earlier measurements on Cu by Pelz and Clarke within the framework of the two-interstitial model of radiation damage of metals is presented.

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