The effects of high electronic excitations in semiconductors are of technological and scientific interest. In this work, the III-V binary compounds InP, InAs, GaP, and GaAs and the related ternary alloys Ga_0.50In_0.50P and Ga_0.47In_0.53As were irradiated at room temperature with 185 MeV Au ions. Damage formation was assessed with Rutherford backscattering spectroscopy in channeling configuration, transmission electron microscopy, and small-angle x-ray scattering. Despite the nearly identical ion energy loss values, the materials responded in a strikingly different manner.

For InP a track radius of 3–4 nm was deduced and the material was readily amorphized. Using extended x-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy, it was shown that the atomic-scale structure was similar for InP amorphized by swift heavy ions or by ions with dominant nuclear energy loss. This is consistent with a melt-and-quench process operative in both regimes despite the different energy transfer mechanisms.

InAs also exhibited considerable irradiation damage though at much higher fluences compared to InP. In contrast, GaP and GaAs remained almost undamaged even after irradiation with 2x10¹⁴ Au/cm². For the ternaries, Ga_0.50In_0.50P was amorphized at fluences only slightly higher than those required for InP and thus behaved similarly to InP but not to GaP. Ga_0.47In_0.53As displayed an irradiation response intermediate to that of InAs and GaAs. A combination of damage formation and annealing was necessary to adequately describe the experimental findings and a simple model yielded surprisingly good fits for InP, InAs, and the two ternaries.