Formation of radiation defects in binary compounds

Ideas are developed about the formation of primary radiation defects in binary semiconductors as a process of excitation of a local region of a crystal, containing a certain number of atoms, up to the point of a phase transition and restructuring of this region. The proposed model is used to calculate and compare with experiment the threshold atomic-displacement energy for a series of II-VI compounds. The computed values of the thresholds are also presented for the compounds HgSe and HgTe which have not yet been studied experimentally