Abstract
? 2022 The Author(s)With this work we attempt to raise awareness of spinodal decomposition among the members of the ion implantation researcher community. In the literature about nanoparticle formation via ion implantation, spinodal decomposition is rarely mentioned. Probably because it is not associated with individual particles which are often the desired goal of the implantation process, but with contiguous, often “labyrinth-like" nanostructures. Using a modified version of the Stochastic Kinetic Modelling Framework (SKMF), we show that spinodal decomposition can directly form nanoparticles, too. Distinguishing nucleation and growth from spinodal decomposition and coarsening based only on the result is very difficult, often impossible, and researchers regularly rely solely on morphological identification, which, as we demonstrate here, can be misleading. The authors believe that understanding nanoparticle formation during and after ion implantation is a good way to initiate a step forward in nucleation theory development, and move away from the strong distinction between nucleation and spinodal decomposition to a more general phase separation theory.
NSTL
Elsevier