Understanding long-time vacancy aggregation in iron: A kinetic activation-relaxation technique study

Article

关键词: INTERATOMIC POTENTIALS;    MONTE-CARLO;    DIFFUSION;    IMPURITIES;    CLUSTERS;    DYNAMICS;    DEFECTS;    SYSTEMS;    METALS;   

DOI  :  10.1103/PhysRevB.90.134109

来源: SCIE

【 摘 要 】

Vacancy diffusion and clustering processes in body-centered-cubic (bcc) Fe are studied using the kinetic activation-relaxation technique (k-ART), an off-lattice kinetic Monte Carlo method with on-the-fly catalog building capabilities. For monovacancies and divacancies, k-ART recovers previously published results while clustering in a 50-vacancy simulation box agrees with experimental estimates. Applying k-ART to the study of clustering pathways for systems containing from one to six vacancies, we find a rich set of diffusion mechanisms. In particular, we show that the path followed to reach a hexavacancy cluster influences greatly the associated mean-square displacement. Aggregation in a 50-vacancy box also shows a notable dispersion in relaxation time associated with effective barriers varying from 0.84 to 1.1 eV depending on the exact pathway selected. We isolate the effects of long-range elastic interactions between defects by comparing to simulations where those effects are deliberately suppressed. This allows us to demonstrate that in bcc Fe, suppressing long-range interactions mainly influences kinetics in the first 0.3 ms, slowing down quick energy release cascades seen more frequently in full simulations, whereas long-term behavior and final state are not significantly affected.

【 授权许可】

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