Paper detail

Comment on "Combined experimental and computational study of the recrystallization process induced by electronic interactions of swift heavy ions with silicon carbide crystals"

A combined experimental and computational study of the recrystallization process induced by swift heavy ions in pre-damaged silicon carbide crystals was reported in a recent paper by Debelle et al. [Phys. Rev. B 86, 100102(R) (2012)]. In this study, the authors tried to mimic by means of molecular dynamic simulations both damage production induced by low energy ion irradiation in SiC and the recrystallization effect generated by subsequent swift heavy ion irradiation. Here we show that the simulations performed by the authors are far from being realistic and cannot reproduce, even qualitatively, the experimental results. In fact, in their simulation of damage production, amorphization is reached at an amount of deposited energy per target atom ($\sim$5.4 eV/atom) which is nearly 5 times less than what is found in previous experimental and computational studies, whereas for the simulation of the recrystallization process, the recrystallization rate per incident ion is about 40 times higher than the experimental value. Because of these extremely huge discrepancies, these molecular dynamic calculations are completely erroneous and the authors cannot claim that they found an "exceptionally good agreement between experiments and simulations" and that "the recovery process is unambiguously accounted for by the thermal spike phenomenon". In addition, no mention is given about a very similar experimental study recently published by some of the authors but with a quite different result for the case of fully amorphous SiC.