Radiation interaction with tilt grain boundaries in β-SiC

Interaction between grain boundaries and radiation is studied in 3C-SiC by conducting molecular dynamics cascade simulations on bicrystal samples with different misorientation angles. The damage in the in-grain regions was found to be unaffected by the grain boundary type and is comparable to damage in single crystal SiC. Radiation-induced chemical disorder in the grain boundary regions is quantified using the homonuclear to heteronuclear bond ratio (chi). We found that chi increases nearly monotonically with the misorientation angle, which behavior has been attributed to the decreasing distance between the grain boundary dislocation cores with an increasing misorientation angle. The change in the chemical disorder due to irradiation was found to be independent of the type of the grain boundary. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3693036]