Low Temperature Crystallization of Amorphous Materials by Electron Excitation Effects

Abstract

Since irradiation often induces atomic configurations far from the equilibrium state, knowledge of structural changes under radiation environments is of technological importance for controlling the physical properties of materials. In addition, the processing temperature for synthesizing materials can be significantly reduced by athermal processes of irradiation. In this article, we report electron-beam-induced crystallization processes of amorphous germanium-tin and alumina studied by transmission electron microscopy. In both cases, critical fluence and flux for inducing the crystallization became small with decreasing the accelerating voltage, suggesting that electron excitation processes play an important role for the amorphous-to-crystalline phase transformation.