Assessment of the relation between ion beam mixing, electron-phonon coupling and damage production in Fe

As a step in the process of assessing the reliability of interatomic potentials for iron, we compare experimental measurements of ion beam mixing with values obtained from molecular dynamics simulations. We include the electron-phonon coupling (EPC) model by Hou et al. [Q. Hou, M. Hou, L. Bardotti, B. Prevel, P. Melinon, A. Perez, Phys. Rev. B 62 (2000) 2825] in the simulations and consider a range of coupling strenghts. Three different iron interatomic potentials are used. We discuss the effect of the coupling on the primary damage and how the damage is influenced by different velocity minima for applying electron stopping.