Radiation Damage Effects in Ferroelectric Litao3 Single Crystals Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • ABSTRACTZ-cut lithium tantalate (LiTaO3) ferroelectric single crystals were irradiated with 200 keV Art++ ions. LiTaO3 possesses a structure that is a derivative of the corundum (A12O3) crystal structure. A systematic study of the radiation damage accumulation rate as a function of ion dose was performed using ion-beam channeling experiments. An ion fluence of 2.51018 Ar2+ ions/m2 was sufficient to amorphize the irradiated volume of a LiTaO3 crystal at an irradiation temperature of 120K. This represents a rather exceptional susceptibility to ion-induced amorphization, which may be related to a highly disparate rate of knock-on of constituent lattice ions, due to the large mass difference between the Li and Ta cations. We also observed that the c end of the ferroelectric polarization exhibits slightly higher ion dechanneling along with an apparent greater susceptibility to radiation damage, as compared to the c+ end of the polarization.

published proceedings

  • MRS Advances

author list (cited authors)

  • Wetteland, C. J., Sickafus, K. E., Gopalan, V., Mitchell, J. N., Hartmann, T., Nastasi, M., ... Mitchell, T. E.

citation count

  • 2

complete list of authors

  • Wetteland, CJ||Sickafus, KE||Gopalan, V||Mitchell, JN||Hartmann, T||Nastasi, M||Maggiore, CJ||Tesmer, JR||Mitchell, TE

publication date

  • January 1997