Swift heavy ion irradiation of SrTiO${}_3$ under grazing incidence

Abstract

The irradiation of SrTiO${}_3$ single crystals with swift heavy ions leads to modifications of the surface. The details of the morphology of these modifications depends strongly on the angle of incidence and can be characterized by atomic force microscopy. At glancing angles, discontinuous chains of nanosized hillocks appear on the surface. The latent track radius can be determined from the variation of the length of the chains with the angle of incidence. This radius is material specific and allows the calculation of the electron-phonon-coupling constant for SrTiO${}_3$. We show that a theoretical description of the nanodot creation is possible within a two-temperature model if the spatial electron density is taken into account. The appearance of discontinuous features can be explained easily within this model, but it turns out that the electronic excitation dissipates on a femtosecond time scale and thus too rapidly to feed sufficient energy into the phonon system in order to induce a thermal melting process. We demonstrate that this can be solved if the temperature dependent diffusion coefficient is introduced into the model.

arXiv comment9 pages, 9 figures Submittted to NJP

References in corpus (4)

• Ab initio pseudopotentials for electronic structure calculations of poly-atomic systems using density-functional theory
• Creation of multiple nanodots by single ions
• Swift heavy ion irradiation of SrTiO${}_3$ under grazing incidence
• Ab-initio calculation of electronic stopping power along glancing swift heavy ion tracks in perovskites

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• SHIPS: A new setup for the investigation of swift heavy ion induced particle emission and surface modifications
• Creation and Microscopic Origins of Single-Photon Emitters in Transition Metal Dichalcogenides and Hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Conductive nanodots on the surface of irradiated CaF2
• Unzipping graphene: Extendend defects by ion irradiation
• Energy threshold for nanodot creation by swift heavy ions