Materials irradiation: from basics to applications

Quite frequently matter is subject to irradiation.

One can think of electronic devices in space, radiotherapies, materials processing by sputtering, nanoparticle modification, materials in the civil nuclear industry, radiation detectors, and many others.

There is a common denominator to these scenarios, and is that radiation brings matter out of equilibrium, sometimes quite dramatically as in laser ablation, leading to a variety of physical, chemical, and biological phenomena at all scales, starting at the attosecond and nanometer with electronic excitation, and going up to meters and days or even years at the engineering or biological scale, where macroscopic phenomena like failure, fracture, explosion, or death can occur as a consequence of irradiation.

Sometimes the goal is to avoid or mitigate damage, and other times is to harness the effects of radiation to alter the properties of materials.

In all these scenarios it is crucial to understand the fundamental mechanisms of material response to intense and fast energy deposition.The research aim of MAMBA is to advance our understanding of material response to irradiation and to apply it to tailor and control the properties of materials exposed, purposedly or involuntarily, to intense radiation environments.

We have selected five case studies lying at the frontier of knowledge, and spanning applications in diverse, although connected, fields: space electronics, photovoltaic cells for space applications, radiation-resistant nanostructures for nuclear fusion applications, radiation detectors for clinical studies, proton radiotherapy, and radiolytic hydrogen generation in nuclear decommissioning.

These topics will be addressed through a combination of experimental and modelling techniques that, to a large degree, are common to these areas.

This commonality allows for cross-pollination between themes and for implementing a rich training program that includes Schools, workshops and many PM of secondments.