Mobility of nano-sized 1/2⟨111⟩ vacancy and interstitial prismatic dislocation loops in tungsten

J Fikar and R Schäublin and DR Mason and D Nguyen-Manh, MODELLING AND SIMULATION IN MATERIALS SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, 33, 065006 (2025).

DOI: 10.1088/1361-651X/adeffb

The vacancies and interstitials produced in high-energy collision cascades of irradiated tungsten can form prismatic dislocation loops with Burgers vectors 1/2(11 1) and (100). The 1/2(1 11) loops are very mobile, and their mobility is essential for the microstructure development of irradiated materials, It is a key parameter for predictive models such as kinetic Monte Carlo. We investigated the mobility of 1/2(111) vacancy and interstitial hexagonal loops as a function of their size using the recent embedded-atom method tungsten potential. The phonon drag phenomenon occurs at high temperatures and can be separated during post-processing from the thermally activated motion. The magnitude of the phonon drag at 300 K was evaluated and appeared to be critical for single interstitial atoms, with a nearly ten-fold increase of their diffusion, while dislocation loops are less influenced.

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