Excitation and relaxation of swift heavy ion irradiated dielectrics

Abstract

The structural modifications of insulators after swift heavy ion irradiation are studied by applying a combination of the Monte-Carlo method (MC), used to describe the excitation and relaxation induced by the penetrating ion in the electronic subsystem, with the two temperature model (TTM) describing the temporal evolution of the lattice temperature heated by the hot electronic system. This MC-TTM combination demonstrates that secondary ionizations play a very important role for the track formation process and is capable to compute important material parameters which are often unaccessible by experiments. It is found that the secondary electron generation leads to an additional energy source in the heat diffusion equation related to energy storage in holes. © 2010 The Surface Science Society of Japan.