Damage production in atomic displacement cascades in beryllium

The paper presents the results of a molecular dynamics simulation of cascade damage production in beryllium caused by self-ion recoils in the energy range of 0.5-3 keV. It is demonstrated that point defects are produced in Be preferentially in well-separated subcascades generated by secondary and higher order recoils. A linear dependence of the point defect number on the primary recoil energy is obtained with the slope that corresponds to formal atom displacement energy of similar to 21 eV. Most of the damage is created as single defects and the relatively high part of created point defects (similar to 50%) survives the correlated recombination following the ballistic cascade stage and becomes freely-migrating. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).