Radiation damage in low dimensional conductors

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Abstract
Low dimensional conductors are solids with very anisotropic transport properties either one or two dimensional. Metals of chains or layers at high temperatures, they are, at low temperatures, either insulators or superconductors because of instabilities of the electron gas responses related to their low dimensionality. The very anisotropic transport properties of these rather new compounds were demonstrated to be important simplifying factors in the studies of disorder and defects in these structures, specially in the determination of the defect concentrations. Radiation damage experiments on this kind of solids have, in turn, provided interesting and original answers to more general radiation effects problems, even leading to a possible application of some of these conductors to Γ-rays and fast neutrons dosimetry. A part of these conductors are organic molecular crystals. The mechanisms of damage production have been explored in some of them and it has been shown that damage rates (g) under X-rays, Γ-rays or electron irradiations can be determined in these conductors even more accurately than in normal molecular crystals. The volume of the average irradiation defect has been determined in one of these molecular conducting solids (TTF-TCNQ). In inorganic low dimensional conductors either lamellar, or one-dimensional, it has been possible to determine rather accurately the concentration of Frenkel pairs produced by electron irradiation and to have a reasonable idea of the location of the self interstitials in the structure. Investigations on the low-temperature phases of these crystals have produced a number of new results about metal-to-insulator and metal-to-superconductor phase transitions in presence of irradiation defects.