The investigation of chemical reactions during the ion irradiation is a frontier for the study of the ion-material interaction. In order to derive the contribution of bond formation to chemistry of ion produced nanoclusters, the valence electron energy loss spectroscopy (VEELS) was exploited to investigate the Ga+ ion damage in Al2O3, InP and InGaAs, where each target material has been shown to yield different process for altering the clustering of recoil atoms: metallic Ga, metallic In and InGaP clusters in Al2O3, InP and InGaAs respectively. Supporting simulations based on Monte Carlo and crystal orbital Hamiltonianindicate that the chemical constitution of cascade induced nano-precipitates is a result of a competition between interstitial/vacancy consumption rate and preferential bond formation.
@article{arxiv.2305.13746,
title = {Preferential bond formation and interstitial/vacancy annihilation rate drive atomic clustering in gallium ion sputtered compound materials},
author = {Zhenyu Ma and Xin Zhang and Pu Liu and Yong Deng and Wenyu Hu and Longqing Chen and Jun Zhu and Sen Chen and Zhengshang Wang and Yuechun Shi and Jian Ma and Xiaoyi Wang and Yang Qiu and Kun Zhang and Xudong Cui and Thomas Walther},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.13746},
year = {2023}
}