Basic mechanisms of atomic displacement production in cubic silicon carbide: A molecular dynamics study

Studying the effects of radiation in silicon carbide (SiC) is important for its possible use in both nuclear and electronic technology. One of the most important parameters to describe radiation damage in a material is the threshold displacement energy (TDE). In this paper, the computational technique known as molecular dynamics (MD) is used to determine the TDE's along different crystallographic directions for Si and C atoms in SiC, also allowing for irradiation temperature effects, and to study in detail the mechanisms of atomic displacement production in this material. For this purpose, the widely tested Tersoff potential, implemented in a MD code optimized to study the interaction of high-energy ions with crystals, is used to describe the interatomic forces in SiC. It is found that it is difficult to define a single threshold for this material. Instead, the introduction of two thresholds, upper and lower, becomes necessary. These two thresholds delimit an uncertainty band, within which the displacement may or may not be produced, because the Frenkel pairs generated in such a transferred-kinetic-energy range are metastable. The Arrhenius law expressing the lifetime of one of these metastable defects has also been deduced from the simulation. Finally, on the basis of the results of the simulation, possible values for the recombination distance and the average threshold energy (E_d,Si and E_d,C) in SiC are proposed and discussed.