Impurity-limited lattice disorder recovery in ion-implanted ZnO

The presence of implanted impurities can affect intrinsic defect annihilation or, in macroscopic terms, so-called lattice recovery, specifically in high dose implantation experiments typically applied to radiation hard materials, e.g., ZnO. Correlating diffusion and lattice recovery data, we demonstrate that F bombardment of ZnO results in a unique situation when implantation induced disorder anneals at anomalously low temperatures, specifically due to the F outdiffusion from the disordered region. Control F + B implants resulted in the suppression of F diffusion and stabilization of the lattice disorder providing the evidence for impurity-limited lattice recovery.