- journal_title：American Mineralogist
- Contributor：Lutz Nasdala ; Andreas Kronz ; Dieter Grambole ; Ghislain Trullenque
- Publisher：Mineralogical Society of America
- Date：2007-
- Format：text/html
- Language：en
- Identifier：10.2138/am.2007.2648
- journal_abbrev：American Mineralogist
- issn：0003-004X
- volume：92
- issue：10
- firstpage：1768
- section：Letters
Radiation damage in a (initially crystalline) silicon wafer was generated by microbeam ion implantation with 600 keV Si+ ions (fluence 5 × 1014 ions/cm2). To produce micro-areas with different degrees of damage, 14 implantations at different temperatures (between 23 and 225 °C) were done. The structural state of irradiated areas was characterized using Raman spectroscopy and electron back-scatter diffraction. All irradiated areas showed strong structural damage in surficial regions (estimated depth <1 μm), and at implant substrate temperatures of below 130 °C, the treatment caused complete amorphization. Back-scattered electron (BSE) image intensities correlate with the degree of irradiation damage; all irradiated areas were higher in BSE than the surrounding host. Because there were no variations in the chemical composition and, with that, no &Zmacr; contrast in our sample, this observation again supports the hypothesis that structural radiation damage may strongly affect BSE images of solids.