Study of the vacancy-type defects formation in tungsten crystal from helium accumulation

Tungsten will be exposed to severe plasma conditions such as high temperature and high particle bombardment as a target of the divertor in the nuclear fusion reactor ITER. High fluxes of light ions will impact its surface and can generate defects in the crystal. This study means to observe the first steps of the vacancy-type defects formation in the tungsten crystal subject to low ion flux of low kinetic energy in order to understand the influence of the accumulation of helium, one of the nuclear reaction products. For the experiments, an ICP-RF plasma source was developed and characterized to perform helium implantations under perfectly controlled conditions. Helium implantations were performed under various conditions of fluence, energy and substrate temperature on polycrystalline tungsten samples. Positron annihilation spectroscopy was used to characterized vacancy-type defects, nuclear reaction analysis to quantify implanted helium and thermal desorption spectrometry to characterised the interactions of helium in the crystal. Results show that, for a kinetic energy of 320 eV and at room temperature, a saturation of the helium implanted quantity is reached for a limit incident fluence and that large vacancy defects starts to form. Study of the kinetic energy and the surface temperature influences show the importance of the depth distribution and the mobility of the helium in the crystal on the size and the diversity of the generated defects. Implantations are performed by molecular dynamic simulations. Results obtained by the numerical approach are compared to experimental ones in order to get a better understanding of the atomic scale mechanisms. (author)