High energy radiation tolerance of iron phosphate glasses: Molecular dynamics study

We report the results of massive parallel molecular dynamics simulations of high-energy radiation damage in phosphate glasses. This damage is created by overlapping multiple 70 keV collision cascades. We quantify different aspects of radiation-induced structural changes including at different stages of damage development, including coordination numbers, cluster sizes and density. The overall trend is that radiation damage causes polymerisation of the glass network and the loss of small and isolated clusters, however the details of this response vary with different glass compositions.