Monitoring of the recovery of ion-damaged 4H-SiC with in situ synchrotron X-ray diffraction as a tool for strain-engineering

In situ thermal annealing (673-1273 K) during X-ray diffraction synchrotron measurements was performed to monitor the strain level as a proxy to follow the recovery of 300 keV Ar ion irradiated 4H-SiC single crystals. Results show that, when exposed to Ar ions at a fluence of 6.7 × 10 ^14 ions/cm ^2 (0.7 dpa), the material suffers a maximum strain of 12 % that reduces to 2 % after the final anneal at 1273 K. In the same time, the disorder derived from the XRD data also demonstrates a thermal recovery of the crystalline structure. Hence, this work presents ion irradiation as a means to induce specific crystalline order and depth-controlled strain states within a few 100 s of nm window in 4H-SiC. Graphical Abstract