Studies were made of the effect of 100MeV O ion bombardment upon defect dynamics in thick films of the oxide. The use of  in situ  resistivity measurements revealed the involvement of various processes such as the displacement of plane, chain and apical O atoms to interstitial sites, the re-trapping of these O atoms at the vacancies, defect- and phonon-induced carrier scattering, and the swelling of grains. These all competed in driving the system away from equilibrium. The development of auto-oscillations during self-organization of the system also occurred, due to the heat that was released by vacancy-interstitial recombination. The recovery of the system to equilibrium after bombardment was shown to be diffusion-assisted, with contributions arising from second-order processes.

T.Mohanty, N.C.Mishra, K.Patnaik, L.Senapati, D.Kanjilal, G.K.Mehta: Materials Science Forum, 1996, 223-224, 187-92