Effect of sink strength on coherency loss of precipitates in dilute Cu-base alloys during in situ ion irradiation

Abstract In situ irradiations with 1 MeV Kr ions at 50∼613K up to a fluence of 6.25 × 1014 ions/cm2 (∼1.25 displacements per atom, dpa) have been performed on pre-aged dilute Cu-0.9%Co, Cu-0.9%Fe and Cu-0.8%Cr alloys containing uniform matrix dispersions of coherent precipitates in order to study the effects of initial precipitate sink strength, damage dose and irradiation temperature on radiation-induced coherency loss of precipitates. Coherent precipitates with different point defect sink strengths (2πNd, where N and d are the precipitate density and diameter) were used in this work to examine potential differences in atomic relaxation during absorption of point defects. In all cases, irradiation to low doses (