2026
ACL
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Jean-Marc Costantini, Aurélien Canizares, Patrick Simon, Christel Laberty-Robert, Gérald Lelong, Maxime Guillaumet, Nathalie Moncoffre, Gianguido Baldinozzi, 'Irradiation response during the early stages of alpha radiation damage in mesoporous nanocrystalline ceria films', Acta Mater. 306 (2026) doi:10.1016/j.actamat.2026.121944
We have studied the effect of alpha radiation on mesoporous ceria in the very early stages of damage by electronic energy loss processes. Most of the studies of the radiation effects in nanocrystalline ceria were performed on relatively dense samples and in the ballistic regime of binary collisions. Few studies on ceramic systems have focused on radiation effects in loosely packed nanocrystalline systems with predominantly free surfaces. Free surfaces are believed to be critical for radiation resistance, but few studies specifically investigated radiation-induced changes of structural correlations in such systems. We irradiated mesoporous nanocrystalline CeO2 films with well-characterized architectures with 800 keV He+ ions. Glancing incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXRD), Raman spectroscopy, and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy were used to measure the quantitative changes in structural correlations and the modification of electronic properties as a function of ion fluence. We show that the decrease of phonon lifetimes and the changes of the optical spectra depends on the excess polaron concentration produced by the irradiation. The implications of these findings for the properties and the radiation resistance of these systems are discussed.
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