ABSTRACT
The experimental study of radiation damage of various materials in existing nuclear reactors is greatly hindered by the fact that this requires very long irradiations. Heavy ions have a scattering cross section roughly 5–6 orders of magnitude greater than neutrons, as a result of which they are roughly a hundred thousand or even a million times more effective in producing radiation damage than neutrons. Although the practical applications of heavy-ion beams only came into use in the 1970s, they are widely used in the electronics industry for alloying of surface or near-surface layers of semiconductor materials. Under the action of heavy ions, a large number of very different nuclides are formed, including those which have a proton excess and decay by positrons. The basic features of the muon spin rotation spectroscopy technique is related to parity non-conservation in weak interactions leading to polarized muons from pion decays.
