Hollow Fission Fragment Tracks in Fluorapatite.

Abstract

Spontaneous fission of uranium in minerals creates a damaged “track” along the trajectory of the fission fragments. Fission tracks in fluorapatite, enlarged by chemical etching, are widely used in geologic age-dating and the reconstruction of the thermal history of Earth’s crust. However, despite this wide spread application, there have been no systematic studies of the internal structure of unetched fission tracks or the atomic-scale process of track annealing. In this research, fission tracks in fluorapatite are demonstrated to be nano-channels instead of amorphous cores as had been assumed. The formation of hollow tracks is ascribed to the highly ionizing energy deposition of fission fragments inducing radiolytic decomposition of fluorapatite accompanied by the loss of volatile elements. The mechanism for thermal annealing of hollow tracks in fluorapatite is shown to be entirely different from that of amorphous tracks in zircon. The discontinuity of fission tracks, in addition to the shrinkage, prevents chemicals from entering into the hollow tracks for further etching, and then significantly reduces the etched length. The shrinkage of hollow fission tracks results from thermo-emission of vacancies or gaseous species from the cavities to surrounding solids instead of atomic-scale recovery of the amorphous core. The high diffusivity of atoms on the surface of hollow tracks causes the discontinuity of tracks either by Rayleigh instability, by Brownian motion, or by preferential motion of track segments. The preferential motion of atoms along c-axis causes more rapid annealing of fission tracks perpendicular to the c-axis. Under the electron beam, the hollow tracks segment into droplets and the track segments randomly move at room temperature or preferentially move along c-axis at high temperatures. The radiolytic annealing results from beam-enhanced diffusion, which is similar to thermally enhanced diffusion. The similarity in the morphology of fission tracks and electron beam-induced bubbles and their preferential elongation along c-axis at high temperatures further confirm that the tracks are actually hollow channels. The radius profile of fission track along its trajectory has been calculated. These data will be critical to developing an atomic-scale model of track fading as it applied to geologic age-dating.