Author Description

The catastrophic effect, as well as a potentially advantageous effect, from energetic beams is the instant high-energy deposition in a local volume, down to the nanoscale, and the rapid cooling processes resulting in changes in the structure and properties of materials that are hard to achieve by other methods. The challenging balance between controlling radiation damage and enhancing material properties has intrigued materials scientists and physicists, as well as engineers in the nuclear and semiconductor industry, and caused them to work closely together for many years. As clearly demonstrated in this volume, many new technologies for creating unique functional devices with energetic particle beams are based on the fundamental study of radiation-induced defect production and evolution. Scientists and engineers working in nuclear engineering, environmental sciences and functional materials share a common language and numerous opportunities for collaboration in this truly interdisciplinary area. Exciting and promising results are presented here, including the most recent progress in fundamental understanding of radiation effects using molecular dynamic (MD) and kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) simulations, processing of monodisperse nanoparticles by ion implantation, production of a wide variety of nanostructures with the application of focused ion beams (FIB), and creating new types of nanoscale functional devices using high-energy ion tracks. These results demonstrate the important relation between fundamental research on radiation effects and the development of new types of nanoscale functional devices using energetic particles over a wide energy range. Topics include: radiation effects in nuclear materials; ion-beam processing of nanostructures; ion-beam processing of semiconductor devices; ion-beam modification of physical properties; modeling and computer simulation of beam-solid interactions; and ion-beam-assisted deposition and surface modification.