Cascade fragmentation: deviation from power law in primary radiation damage

The sizes of defect clusters, produced in materials by energetic ion or neutron impacts, are critically important input for models describing microstructural evolution of irradiated materials. We propose a model for the distribution of sizes of vacancy and self-interstitial defect clusters formed by high-energy impacts in tungsten, and provide new data from in situ ion irradiation experiments to validate the model. The model predicts the statistics of sub-cascade splitting and the resulting distribution of primary defects extending over the entire range of cluster sizes, and is able to provide initial conditions for quantitative multi-scale simulations of microstructural evolution.