It was recalled that a crystalline-to-amorphous transition occurred in samples which were irradiated at low temperatures, but the microscopic mechanism was not well understood. A molecular dynamics simulation was made here of low-energy (100eV) recoil accumulation at 20K, up to about 1dpa, where the computational sample became amorphous and was then annealed at 2320K. The simulation suggested that, for low-mass impinging particles where no direct impact amorphization took place, the driving force for the crystalline-to-amorphous transition was the accumulation of Frenkel pairs up to a critical concentration of about 1.9 x 1022/cm3). The role played by antisites in this process was negligible. Instead, antisite formation during annealing could be a bottleneck in complete recovery. A simple analytical model which was based upon concepts of recombination barriers and interstitial migration was proposed in order to describe the temperature dependence of the critical dose for amorphization.

Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Irradiation-Induced Amorphization of Cubic Silicon Carbide. L.Malerba, J.M.Perlado: Journal of Nuclear Materials, 2001, 289[1-2], 57-70