Superheated solid state induced by a single collision event

Abstract

High-energy incident particles from both pulsed and continuous radiation sources can induce significant damage to the structure of a material by creating vacancy-interstitial pairs and other more complex defects, and this leads typically to localized melting. In this work, we present evidence via molecular dynamics simulations of a superheated solid state in BCC tungsten induced by single PKA events of $\sim$ 1.5 keV of energy. Despite the striking difference between this highly inhomogeneous energy injection and homogeneous melting, the lifetime of the obtained superheated solid state, reaching up to 200 ps, is described through a waiting time distribution in agreement with previous studies on superheating in the Z-method methodology.

References in corpus (6)

• Gaussian Approximation Potentials: the accuracy of quantum mechanics, without the electrons
• A Spectral Analysis Method for Automated Generation of Quantum-Accurate Interatomic Potentials
• High energy collision cascades in tungsten: dislocation loops structure and clustering scaling laws
• Statistical distribution of thermal vacancies close to the melting point
• Bayesian statistical modelling of microcanonical melting times at the superheated regime
• A general statistical model for waiting times until collapse of a system