Study of the applicability of the inelastic thermal peak model to describe the track formation mechanism in Si 3 N 4

Abstract

This paper presents the study of the applicability of the inelastic thermal spike model to describe the process of
track formation in silicon nitride irradiated with high-energy heavy ions. The interaction of incident ions and material atoms was simulated by the i-TS software using three coefficients of the electron - phonon interaction λ = 3, 4.3, and 4.8 nm. It is shown that the experimental values of the track dimensions are very different from the theoretical ones for both crystalline and amorphous Si 3 N 4 . It implies that current approach is inapplicable to describe experimental results in silicon nitride.