Displacement cascades and defect annealing in tungsten, Part III: The sensitivity of cascade annealing in tungsten to the values of kinetic parameters

Abstract A study has been performed using object kinetic Monte Carlo (OKMC) simulations to investigate various aspects of cascade aging in bulk tungsten (W) and to determine its sensitivity to the kinetic parameters. The primary focus is on how the kinetic parameters affect the intracascade recombination of defects. Results indicate that, due to the disparate mobilities of SIA and vacancy clusters, annealing is dominated by SIA migration even at 2050 K. It was found that for 100 keV cascades initiated at 300 K, recombination is dominated by the annihilation of large defect clusters, while for all the other primary knock-on atom (PKA) energies and temperatures, recombination is primarily due to the migration and rotation of small SIA clusters, while the large SIA clusters escape the simulation cell. The annealing efficiency exhibits an inverse U-shaped curve behavior with increasing temperature, especially at large PKA energies, caused by the asymmetry in SIA and vacancy clustering assisted by the large differences in their mobilities. This behavior is unaffected by the dimensionality of SIA migration, and it persists over a broad range of relative mobilities of SIAs and vacancies.