Effects of temperature in binary collision simulations of high-energy displacement cascades

Several hundred cascades ranging from 1 to 500 keV were generated using the binary collision code MARLOWE for primary knock-on atoms (PKAs) with randomly chosen directions in both a non-thermal copper lattice and one having atomic displacements representative of room temperature. To simulate the recombination occurring during localized quenching of the highly excited cascade region, an effective spontaneous recombination radius was applied to reduce the number of defect pairs to be consistent with values extracted from resistivity measurements at 4 K. At room temperature fewer widely separated pairs are produced, thus the recombination radius is smaller; however, the recombination radii were found to be independent of energy over the entire energy range investigated for both the cold and room temperature cases. The sizes and other features of the point defect distributions were determined as a function of energy. Differences between cold and room temperature cascade dimensions are small. The room temperature cascades tend to have a greater number of distinct damage regions per cascade, but about the same frequency of widely separated sub-cascades. (orig.)