Materials Science: Displacement Threshold, Primary Damage Efficiency, Temperature, Hardening, Defect

Displacement Threshold

Please answer the following questions using content seen during the lectures, content from textbooks and content from peer-reviewed articles, as needed.

Displacement threshold
a. What is a displacement threshold?
b. Enumerate three methods to measure or calculate it. What are their pros and cons? 

Primary damage production efficiency
a. How can one calculate the efficiency of primary damage production, as a ratio of NRTdpa?
b. How does this ratio vary as a function of PKA energy? Why?

Choosing appropriate temperature.Taking into account both differences in damage production efficiency and typical experimental conditions, explain why when attempting to emulate themicrostructural developments under neutron irradiation, a proton irradiation experiment will be
carried out a higher temperature than the corresponding neutron irradiation.

Radiation-induced hardening. How can one calculate radiation-induced hardening in a material? Is it sufficient to calculate it at a single scale, or is a multi-scale approach preferable?

Radiation-induced defects and clusters
a. How can one calculate the types and numbers of defects and clusters produced by a PKA?
b. How can one predict their evolution over timescales of seconds? Describe three techniques to do this and their pros and cons.
c. How can one make predictions over a few years? What technique can one use

a. What is the ZBL potential? On what is it based?

b. Is it accurate? How can we verify its accuracy

(i)-experimentally and

(ii)- computationally?

c. Describe two computational techniques that use this potential.

d. Can the ZBL potential be combined with other interaction potentials? If so, are there rules which should be followed?