Radiation-Tolerant Nanomaterials Simulator

High-energy neutrons and ions knock atoms out of their lattice sites, creating vacancy-interstitial defect pairs that wander through the crystal. In an ordinary coarse-grained material those defects have nowhere to go, so they cluster into growing voids and dislocation loops — swelling and embrittling the material over time. This simulator fires the same irradiation flux at two side-by-side lattices: a coarse-grained sample with only a handful of widely-spaced grain boundaries, and a nanocrystalline sample whose dense mesh of boundaries acts as an efficient defect sink, absorbing point defects before they can cluster. Tune the irradiation rate and the nanocrystalline grain size to see how boundary density controls radiation tolerance.