Systematic study of displacement threshold and the near-threshold primary radiation damage model

Abstract

Radiation damage is a critical concern for materials employed in radiation environments such as space, radiotherapy centers, and nuclear energy systems. Numerous models have been developed to estimate the primary radiation damage. The slightly modified Athermal Recombination-Corrected (mARC)-Displacement per Atom (DPA) model proposes a simple function to describe the atomic displacement near the Threshold Displacement Energy (TDE). The present work systematically investigates the global minimum TDE and the near-TDE mARC-DPA model against experimental electron irradiation damage data for 26 materials. The determined high-accuracy global minimum TDE values are generally consistent with previous studies. The corresponding theoretical calculations agree well with experimental measurements, implying the applicability of the mARC model. Renormalization of certain experimental data is required due to the potential issues related to experimental measurements, the value of resistivity change per Frenkel pair (${\rho }_{FP}$), or average TDE ($E_d$). Nevertheless, while some experimental data are supposed to be adjusted, the analysis shows that the ratio of ${\rho }_{FP}/E_d$ can be definitively determined if assuming the experimental data for the remainders.