Dynamic behavior of implanted nitrogen in zirconium at various stages of implantations

Abstract

Depth profiles of nitrogen implanted into Zr with an energy of 50 keV were calculated by dynamic SASAMAL code with three different assumptions for the diffusion of excess atoms over stoichiometry, i.e., ‘no diffusion', ‘both-sides-diffusion’ and ‘upward-diffusion'. To distinguish nitrogens implanted certain stage of implantations, alternate implantations of ¹⁵N and ¹⁴N were used. The results were compared with the experimental results by the resonance nuclear reaction analysis, NRA. For ¹⁵N implantation with fluences from 1 × 10¹⁷ to 1 × 10¹⁸ ions/cm², the calculated results with ‘upward-diffusion’ agreed very well with the NRA results for all fluences. For the depth profile of pre-implanted ¹⁵N (1 × 10¹⁷ ions/cm²), which was changed by the subsequent ¹⁴N implantation with fluences of 1 ～ 10 × 10¹⁷ ions/cm², the agreement with the NRA results was satisfactory until the ¹⁴N fluence did not exceed 5 × 10¹⁷ ions/cm², but for higher fluences, the retained probabilities of ¹⁵N obtained by the ‘upward-diffusion’ code were too low compared with the experimental value obtained by NRA. For the depth profiles of ¹⁵N (1 × 10¹⁷ ions/cm²) implanted following after implantations of ¹⁴N with fluences of 1 ～ 10 × 10¹⁷ ions/cm², the agreement with the NRA results was quite good for all ¹⁴N fluences. It is concluded that the approximation of ‘upward-diffution’ is proper satisfactorily for the treatment of atoms implanted at the final stage of implantations, but a problem is left for the treatment of atoms implanted at the early stage of implantations.