It has long been known that defects such as stacking faults and voids can be quenched from various alloyed metals heated to near their melting point. Today it is common practice to irradiate samples with various ionic species of rare gases which also form voids containing solidified phases of the same atomic species, e.g. ref. 3. Equivalently, electron irradiation has been used to produce damage events, e.g. ref. 4. Generally all of the above mentioned studies have relied on diffraction contrast to observe the defects produced down to a dimension of perhaps 10 to 20Å. Also all these studies have used ions or electrons which exceeded the damage threshold for knockon events. In the case of higher resolution studies the present author has identified vacancy and interstitial type chain defects in ion irradiated Si and was able to identify both di-interstitial and di-vacancy chains running through the foil.
