Evidence for a kinetic bias towards antisite formation in SiC nano-decomposition

This paper is devoted to the investigation of the mechanisms of Frenkel pair recombination in cubic silicon carbide. We use first principles calculations in the framework of Density Functional Theory (DFT) and we explore a variety of possible recombination paths using constrained relaxations and the Nudged-Elastic-Band (NEB) method for various possible neutral Frenkel pairs, including those formed by defects on different sublattices (carbon and silicon). We detect several metastable configurations, some of which have not been described previously. We also consider that silicon vacancies can assume the form of carbon antisite–carbon vacancy complexes and, as such, their recombination with interstitials can occur along specific paths. In particular, in this case, we find that the recombination with silicon interstitials would probably produce antisite pairs. Finally, we use our calculated recombination barriers for a simplified kinetic model which shows that, under certain hypotheses, the annealing of irradiation defects can lead to the build up of a non negligible concentration of antisites, i.e., to a nanoscale decomposition of the material driven by a kinetic bias.