2008/01/30 by Ender Akcoeltekin, Ender Akcöltekin, Sevilay Akcoeltekin +7 · 1 citation
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Electronic and Structural Properties of Oxides #Ion-surface interactions and analysis #Nuclear materials and radiation effects #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1367-2630/10/5/053007
9 pages, 9 figures Submittted to NJP
arxiv created 2008/01/30 · openalex publication_date 2008/05/07 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The irradiation of SrTiO 3 single crystals with swift heavy ions leads to modifications of the surface. The details of the morphology of these modifications depend strongly on the angle of incidence and can be characterized by atomic force microscopy. At glancing angles, discontinuous chains of nanosized hillocks appear on the surface. From the variation of the length of the chains with the angle of incidence the latent track radius can be determined. This radius is material specific and allows the calculation of the electron–phonon coupling constant for SrTiO 3 . We show that a theoretical description of the nanodot creation is possible within a two-temperature model if the spatial electron density is taken into account. The appearance of discontinuous features can be explained easily within this model, but it turns out that the electronic excitation dissipates on a femtosecond timescale, too rapidly to feed sufficient energy into the phonon system in order to induce a thermal melting process. We demonstrate that this can be solved if a temperature-dependent diffusion coefficient is introduced into the model.