Qualifying materials for future fission and fusion reactors is painfully slow. Neutron irradiation is costly, time-consuming and leaves samples radioactive, while ion-beam alternatives require competitive proposals and scheduled beam time at oversubscribed accelerator facilities. In a new preprint, we ask whether an instrument already sitting in many microscopy labs — the plasma focused ion beam (PFIB) — can do the job instead. Back in 2022, we demonstrated the concept for the first time in silicon in our paper Rethinking radiation effects in materials science using the plasma-focused ion beam (Journal of Materials Science); this new work takes the crucial next step: testing the approach on a metal representative of structural alloys used in nuclear environments.
Led by Adriana Eres-Castellanos, Director’s Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, together with colleagues at the Colorado School of Mines and our group in Leoben, we irradiated high-purity aluminium foils with the PFIB’s Xe⁺ beam at 30 keV, reaching damage levels up to ~2.5 displacements per atom in a matter of seconds to minutes — and then characterised the resulting dislocation loops directly with scanning transmission electron microscopy. The verdict: PFIB is an effective, versatile and genuinely high-throughput screening tool for irradiation damage in metals, though not without caveats — the damage is concentrated in a thin near-surface layer with a steep Gaussian-like profile, and dose rates far exceed reactor conditions, so interpretation demands care. A word of caution as always: this is a preprint and has not yet been peer-reviewed, but we believe the approach could dramatically widen access to radiation-damage studies.
The pre-print: A. Eres-Castellanos, M. M. Schneider, M. A. Tunes, M. Weems, P. Kumar, and A. J. Clarke (2026). High-throughput evaluation of radiation damage in metals via plasma focused ion beam. Preprint available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7095158
Materials at Extremes 