Nicolò Forcellini

In Plain English

The study of radiation damage caused to materials is of fundamental practical importance in the nuclear, space industries and in medicine for the case of radiotherapy: unintended damage in materials used in nuclear reactors, spacecraft and satellites can compromise their functionality; therefore, a thorough understanding of the physical processes involved in radiation is demanded, to help the efforts to improve the lifetime of materials in such hostile environments.

The mechanisms are very difficult to access directly using experimental probes, since the time scale of such processes is of the order of a few picoseconds: the damage distributions can be revealed in the material once they happened, but the physical process, especially in the early stages, needs to be modelled theoretically. Approaches to the study of radiation damage can be various, and have been explored for over a century. With the advance of computing power and resources, a transition from classical molecular dynamics models to include quantum effects became increasingly feasible and reliable, for example after the introduction of TDDFT. The method that is proposed, using the so-called Floquet theory, aims to provide a natural framework for the study of radiation damage, which may provide further insight for such processes.