Abstract
The early stages of nucleation and growth of dislocations by irradiation in urania is clarified based on the combination of experiments and atomistic calculations. It is established that irradiation induced dislocations follow a five stage process: (i) point defects are first created by irradiation, (ii) they aggregate into clusters, (iii) from which nucleate Frank loops, (iv) which transform into unfaulted loops via Shockley that in turn grow, and (v) finally reorganize into forest dislocations. Stages (i)–(iii) participate in the lattice expansion while the onset of lattice contraction starts with stage (iv), i.e., when unfaulted loops nucleate. Irradiation induced dislocations operate in the spontaneous recombination regime, to be opposed to the thermal diffusion regime. Body of arguments collaborates to this statement, the main one is the comparison between characteristic distances estimated from the dose rate (Vat/(K0×τ))1/3 and from the diffusion coefficient (D×τ)1/2. Such a comparison identifies materials under irradiation as belonging either into the recombination regime or not.