Irradiation-induced modifications and PEC response - A case study of SrTiO3 thin films irradiated by 120 MeV Ag ions

This paper deals with a study on the effect of 120 MeV Ag⁹⁺ ion irradiation on photoelectrochemical properties of SrTiO₃ thin films deposited on Indium doped Tin Oxide (ITO) coated glass by sol-gel spin-coating technique. The structural evolution in the pristine and irradiated films was determined by X-ray diffraction and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Surface morphology was studied by Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and optical measurements were done by UV-visible absorption spectroscopy. Irradiation of SrTiO₃ thin films was found to be effective in improving its photoelectrochemical properties. A noticeable decrease in the average grain diameter from 36 to 26 nm, reduction in bandgap from 3.55 to 3.43 eV and increase in roughness after irradiation contributed in enhancing photoelectrochemical activity of SrTiO₃ thin films. Thin films irradiated at fluence 3 × 10¹² ions cm⁻², when used in PEC cell exhibited enhanced photocurrent of 0.16 mA cm⁻² at zero bias conditions, which was four times higher than that of the unirradiated sample.     

Structural modifications induced by swift heavy ions in thin films of yttria fully stabilized zirconia

Among ceramic materials for nuclear waste containment, single crystal yttria fully stabilized zirconia (FSZ) gained particular consideration because of its excellent radiation resistance both in the elastic and inelastic collision regime. We deposited amorphous and polycrystalline, cubic FSZ thin films on (1 0 0) Si by ultraviolet pulsed laser ablation and irradiated them with swift heavy uranium ions of 2.6-GeV energy at fluences between 2 and 12 × 10¹¹ ions cm⁻². The films were characterized before and after irradiation using X-ray reflectivity, grazing incidence X-ray diffraction, micro-Raman spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy. Under ion irradiation, as-deposited crystalline films undergo amorphisation, followed by partial recrystallisation, whereas as-deposited amorphous films retain their disordered character. The dominant defects produced in the films are oxygen vacancies which may explain the amorphisation to recrystallisation path of our crystalline films.     

Workflow performance improvement using model-based scheduling over multiple clusters and clouds

In recent years, a variety of computational sites and resources have emerged, and users often have access to multiple resources that are distributed. These sites are heterogeneous in nature and performance of different tasks in a workflow varies from one site to another. Additionally, users typically have a limited resource allocation at each site capped by administrative policies. In such cases, judicious scheduling strategy is required in order to map tasks in the workflow to resources so that the workload is balanced among sites and the overhead is minimized in data transfer. Most existing systems either run the entire workflow in a single site or use naïve approaches to distribute the tasks across sites or leave it to the user to optimize the allocation of tasks to distributed resources. This results in a significant loss in productivity. We propose a multi-site workflow scheduling technique that uses performance models to predict the execution time on resources and dynamic probes to identify the achievable network throughput between sites. We evaluate our approach using real world applications using the Swift parallel and distributed execution framework. We use two distinct computational environments-geographically distributed multiple clusters and multiple clouds. We show that our approach improves the resource utilization and reduces execution time when compared to the default schedule.     

Structural and spectroscopic modifications of nanocrystalline zinc oxide films induced by swift heavy ions

Structural and spectroscopic modifications of nanocrystalline (nc) ZnO films induced by Swift heavy ion (SHI) irradiation is reported. Films were irradiated at incremented ion fluences. Structural study reveals that the nanocrystals become more oriented at low fluences, while a release of strain and decrease in grain size is observed at high fluence. The surface morphology study also shows a decrease in crystallite size and agglomeration of grains at high fluence. On the other hand micro-Raman and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) results show that the longitudinal optical (LO) mode is strengthened and red shifted, while the transverse optical (TO) mode get dampened at high fluence. But the amorphization of crystallites was not observed under the used irradiation conditions. The observed structural and spectroscopic modifications are explained in terms of high density of lattice defects and disorder created by dense electronic excitations induced by SHI irradiation.     

Structural and electrical properties of swift heavy ion beam irradiated Co/Si interface

Synthesis of swift heavy ion induced metal silicide is a new advancement in materials science research. We have investigated the mixing at Co/Si interface by swift heavy ion beam induced irradiation in the electronic stopping power regime. Irradiations were undertaken at room temperature using 120 MeV Au ions at the Co/Si interface for investigation of ion beam mixing at various doses: 8 × 10¹², 5 × 10¹³ and 1 × 10¹⁴ cm⁻². Formation of different phases of cobalt silicide is identified by the grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXRD) technique, which shows enhancement of intermixing and silicide formation as a result of irradiation.I–V characteristics at Co/Si interface were undertaken to understand the irradiation effect on conduction mechanism at the interface.     

Swift heavy ion induced magnetic phase transition of Fe–Rh alloy

We report the effects of swift heavy ion irradiation on structure and magnetic properties of Fe–50at.%Rh alloys. The alloys are irradiated with 120–200 MeV heavy ions (Ni, Kr or Xe) at room temperature. Before and after the irradiations, the magnetization and the lattice parameter are measured by using superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) and X-ray diffractometer (XRD), respectively. The lattice parameter at room temperature increases by about 0.3% and antiferromagnetic–ferromagnetic transition temperature decreases below 5 K by the irradiations. Effects of electronic excitation due to swift heavy ions on the change in magnetic properties and lattice structure are discussed.     

Revised cloud storage structure for light-weight data archiving in LHD

The LHD data archiving system has newly selected GlusterFS distributed filesystem for the replacement of the present cloud storage software named “IznaStor/dSS”. Even though the prior software provided many favorable functionalities of hot plug and play node insertion, internal auto-replication of data files, and symmetric load balancing between all member nodes, it revealed a poor feature in recovering from an accidental malfunction of a storage node. Once a failure happened, the recovering process usually took at least several days or sometimes more than a week with a heavy cpu load. In some cases they fell into the so-called “split-brain” or “amnesia” condition, not to get recovered from it. Since the recovery time tightly depends on the capacity size of the fault node, individual HDD management is more desirable than large volumes of HDD arrays. In addition, the dynamic mutual awareness of data location information may be removed if some other static data distribution method can be applied. In this study, the candidate middleware of “OpenStack/Swift” and “GlusterFS” has been tested by using the real mass of LHD data for more than half a year, and finally GlusterFS has been selected to replace the present IznaStor. It has implemented very limited functionalities of cloud storage but a simplified RAID10-like structure, which may consequently provide lighter-weight read/write ability. Since the LABCOM data system is implemented to be independent of the storage structure, it is easy to plug off the IznaStor and on the new GlusterFS. The effective I/O speed is also confirmed to be on the same level as the estimated one from raw performance of disk hardware. This achievement may be informative to implement the ITER CODAC and the remote archiving system.     

Electronic stopping dependence of ion beam induced modifications in GaN

We report here Swift heavy ion induced effects in GaN samples grown by metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) technique. These samples were irradiated with 80 MeV Ni and 100 MeV Ag ions at a fixed fluence of 1 × 10¹³ ions/cm². Ion species and energies are chosen such that the difference in their electronic energy loss (S_e) would be 8 keV/nm. Effects of Ag on structural and optical properties over Ni ions have been discussed extensively. We employed different characterization techniques like High Resolution X-ray Diffraction (HRXRD) and Raman Spectroscopy for defect density calculations and for vibrational modes, respectively. Defect densities are calculated and compared using Williamson-Hall method from HRXRD. Change of strain and vibrational modes with S_e has been discussed.     

Swift heavy ion irradiation induced modifications in the optical band gap and Urbach’s tail in polyaniline nanofibers

Optical band gap and Urbach tail width of HCl and CSA doped polyaniline (PAni) nanofibers and the ion beam induced modifications in the band gap and Urbach’s tail of the samples have been studied employing UV-Vis absorption spectroscopy. All the major bands appearing in the FTIR spectra exhibit a decrease in intensity and broadening in their band widths upon interaction with the highly energetic ion beams. This suggests that SHI irradiation induces chain-scissioning events in the PAni nanofibers. An interesting result that comes out from the FTIR analysis is a transition from the benzenoid to quinoid states in the PAni chains, which reveals that there is a decrease in the degree of conjugation in the polymer upon irradiation. Optical absorption studies indicate three direct allowed transitions at ∼2.64, 3.61 and 4.08 eV for HCl doped PAni nanofibers and at ∼2.62, 3.49 and 4.02 eV for the CSA doped PAni nanofibers. The optical band gap is found to increase with increasing ion fluence which may be attributed to the reduction in the fiber diameters upon irradiation, which is corroborated by TEM analysis. Increase in the optical band gap also points out to a decrease in the conjugation length due to the larger torsion angles between the adjacent phenyl rings of the polymer with respect to the plane of the nitrogen atoms, which is also supported by FTIR results. The Urbach tail width decreases with increasing ion fluence indicating that structural disorders are annealed out of the PAni nanofibers which is also observed from the plots of (αhν)² against photon energy (hν) for HCl doped PAni nanofibers. The quantum confinement effect is confirmed by fact that a band gap exhibits a linear dependence on the inverse of the square of the radius of the PAni nanofibers. Infact, the increase in the optical band gap may be a combined effect of the decrease in the Urbach band width and the quantum confinement effect.     

Structure changes in InP and GaAs crystals double irradiated with electrons and swift heavy ions

We have studied InP and GaAs crystal structure changes under the influence of swift Kr and Bi ions irradiation by means of scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy (AFM) and selective chemical etching. The previous disordering of samples by electron irradiation is shown to be leading to macrodefect formation in the form of cracks and breaks at the depths near the ion end-of-range and on the crystal surface. A possible explanation of the observed effects is proposed.