Study on structural properties of swift heavy ion induced damage in Al2O3

Polycrystalline α-Al2O3 is irradiated using 100 MeV Au ion, with fluences range extended from 1 × 1012 to 1 × 1014 ions/cm2. The objective of this work is to study the impact of swift heavy ion (SHI) on structural and morphological properties of α-Al2O3 and confirm the predicted results with the help of thermal spike (TS) model. XRD result reveals that there is a decrease in peak intensities with an increase in ion fluence. The reduction of peak intensity indicates the increased disorder or defect formation in α-Al2O3 due to SHI irradiation. Further, PL results also corroborated with the XRD outcome. Information on damage formation and molten track radius is extracted from the XRD data, and the molten track radius is obtained to be ∼2.42 ± 0.13 nm. Morphological changes due to SHI irradiation are studied using FESEM and AFM techniques and reveal the increase of surface roughness with the SHI fluences. Furthermore, the radius of latent track formation and radiation-induced lattice temperature spike are estimated for SHI irradiated Al2O3 using three cases; elastic TS model (only Sn), inelastic TS model (only Se), and unified TS model (Sn + Se). The numerically calculated latent track considering the combined contribution of Sn and Se in the unified TS model is around 2.6 nm, which is in good agreement with the experimental determination. The present study investigates the overall performance of structural properties of Al2O3 for SHI irradiation and explains the radiation tolerance of ceramic for corresponding ion fluence. •Polycrystalline α-Al2O3 is irradiated with 100 MeV Au ion for different fluences.•The damage formation is studied using XRD, PL, AFM, and FESEM techniques.•Increase of surface roughness because of defects production after SHI irradiation.•The latent track radius extracted from XRD data is ∼2.42 nm for irradiated Al2O3.•The obtained result is further validated using Thermal Spike Model and agreed well.