Paper
Rapid Primary Radiation Damage Resistance Assessment of Precipitation-Hardened Cu Alloys
Authors
Elena Botica-Artalejo, Gregory Wallace, Michael P. Short
Abstract
This study establishes a direct correlation between in situ irradiation-induced property changes measured by transient grating spectroscopy (TGS) and the resulting microstructural damage in Cu-Cr-Ta alloys. Thin films fabricated by physical vapor deposition were irradiated with 6.6 MeV Cu +3 ions up to 25 DPA, while TGS continuously monitored the evolution of surface acoustic wave (SAW) frequency and thermal diffusivity. Post-irradiation transmission electron microscopy (TEM) was used to quantify void formation as a metric of accumulated radiation damage. A pronounced decrease in SAW frequency was observed some seconds after the onset of irradiation, and it was found to correlate strongly with the final void density. Vacancy MEB calculations propose that the small decrease in SAW frequency is associated with the low population of mobile vacancies, promoting defect recombination and decreasing void formation. This relationship enables early prediction of relative radiation damage resistance within minutes of irradiation, substantially reducing the time required compared to conventional irradiation and postcharacterization routes, allowing rapid screening of multiple compositions. We were able to test this method with 3 compositions of the Cu-Cr-Ta system. More generally, this in situ approach provides an efficient pathway for accelerating the development of materials for radiation environments.
Metadata
Related papers
Fractal universe and quantum gravity made simple
Fabio Briscese, Gianluca Calcagni • 2026-03-25
POLY-SIM: Polyglot Speaker Identification with Missing Modality Grand Challenge 2026 Evaluation Plan
Marta Moscati, Muhammad Saad Saeed, Marina Zanoni, Mubashir Noman, Rohan Kuma... • 2026-03-25
LensWalk: Agentic Video Understanding by Planning How You See in Videos
Keliang Li, Yansong Li, Hongze Shen, Mengdi Liu, Hong Chang, Shiguang Shan • 2026-03-25
Orientation Reconstruction of Proteins using Coulomb Explosions
Tomas André, Alfredo Bellisario, Nicusor Timneanu, Carl Caleman • 2026-03-25
The role of spatial context and multitask learning in the detection of organic and conventional farming systems based on Sentinel-2 time series
Jan Hemmerling, Marcel Schwieder, Philippe Rufin, Leon-Friedrich Thomas, Mire... • 2026-03-25
Raw Data (Debug)
{
"raw_xml": "<entry>\n <id>http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21093v1</id>\n <title>Rapid Primary Radiation Damage Resistance Assessment of Precipitation-Hardened Cu Alloys</title>\n <updated>2026-02-24T16:54:00Z</updated>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21093v1' rel='alternate' type='text/html'/>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21093v1' rel='related' title='pdf' type='application/pdf'/>\n <summary>This study establishes a direct correlation between in situ irradiation-induced property changes measured by transient grating spectroscopy (TGS) and the resulting microstructural damage in Cu-Cr-Ta alloys. Thin films fabricated by physical vapor deposition were irradiated with 6.6 MeV Cu +3 ions up to 25 DPA, while TGS continuously monitored the evolution of surface acoustic wave (SAW) frequency and thermal diffusivity. Post-irradiation transmission electron microscopy (TEM) was used to quantify void formation as a metric of accumulated radiation damage. A pronounced decrease in SAW frequency was observed some seconds after the onset of irradiation, and it was found to correlate strongly with the final void density. Vacancy MEB calculations propose that the small decrease in SAW frequency is associated with the low population of mobile vacancies, promoting defect recombination and decreasing void formation. This relationship enables early prediction of relative radiation damage resistance within minutes of irradiation, substantially reducing the time required compared to conventional irradiation and postcharacterization routes, allowing rapid screening of multiple compositions. We were able to test this method with 3 compositions of the Cu-Cr-Ta system. More generally, this in situ approach provides an efficient pathway for accelerating the development of materials for radiation environments.</summary>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cond-mat.mtrl-sci'/>\n <published>2026-02-24T16:54:00Z</published>\n <arxiv:comment>28 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables</arxiv:comment>\n <arxiv:primary_category term='cond-mat.mtrl-sci'/>\n <author>\n <name>Elena Botica-Artalejo</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Gregory Wallace</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Michael P. Short</name>\n </author>\n </entry>"
}