pysrim: Automation, Analysis, and Plotting of SRIM Calculations
Christopher Ostrouchov, Yanwen Zhang, William J. Weber · The Journal of Open Source Software · 2018
The behavior of ions traveling through a material is of great interest to many fields.For instance, radiation damage in nuclear materials and ion beam modification of materials are most concerned with understanding the formation and evolution of defects along the ion path (Was 2016).Some of the important properties that can be gleaned from investigating the initial damage from the ion include: numbers of interstitials and vacancies produced, energy deposited per unit length to electrons and atomic nuclei, track diameter, and implanted ion profile.These properties enable further simulations and allow computing a common unit of radiation damage dose, displacements per atom (dpa), which can be used to compare irradiation experiments with different ions (Backman et al. 2013) (Stoller et al. 2013).Additionally, the ejection of materials near the surface due to incident ions is important to sputtering and ion-beam analysis techniques, such as elastic recoil detection analysis (ERDA) and secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) (Vickerman and Gilmore 2011).The interaction of ions within a material can be broken into two parts: electronic and nuclear stopping.Electronic stopping is the energy lost from the ion due to inelastic collisions with electrons along its path.Nuclear stopping is the energy lost due to elastic collisions between the ion and atomic nuclei within the material.