Effect of thermal friction on the generation and transport of interstitial defects in irradiated metals

Generation of interstitial and vacancy defects under 14.1 MeV neutron irradiation is expected to drive the evolution of microstructure of materials in a future fusion power station. We investigate effects of thermal friction associated with the interaction between mobile clusters of interstitial atoms produced in collision cascades and phonon excitations. Phonons give rise to the random Brownian motion of clusters in the crystal lattice. Phonon excitations are also responsible for the dissipation of energy of rapidly moving clusters formed at the periphery of collision cascades. We investigate how the coefficient of thermal friction depends on the structure of clusters. We also discuss implications of our findings for understanding the origin of higher resistance of bcc metals to irradiation and the connection between this phenomenon and the long-range effect observed in experiments on ion implantation