Reply to comment on ‘Large swelling and percolation in irradiated zircon’

Abstract

The authors of the comment (Corrales et al 2003 J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 15 6447) on ourpaper (Trachenko et al 2003 J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 15 L1) suggested thatdifferent simulation conditions could result in different results, including a widerspread of the damage. To show that this is not the case, we have repeated thesimulations, exactly as proposed by the authors of the comment, using new potentialswith ZBL short-range terms and with potentials proposed by the authors of thecomment (Park et al 2001 Phys. Rev. B 64 174108). We find that, contrary to thesuggestions of the authors of the comment, the damage is well localized in thesimulation box and is generally similar to that found in the original paper. We findthat, similar to our previous results, the damage has a depleted region in thecentre and is more dense at the boundaries. We show that the suggestions of theauthors of the comment, that the damage should be more spread in our simulations,probably originate from unphysical results derived in their previous simulation work.