Preface

In a press release on 4 February 2008, the Association for Computing Machinery announced that the 2007 A. M. Turing Award would be given to three of the pioneers of Symbolic Model-Checking; Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis. The Press release continues by several statements that motivate the assignment of the prize such as “Their innovations transformed this approach from a theoretical technique to a highly effective verification technology that enables computer hardware and software engineers to find errors efficiently in complex system designs” and the statement by ACM President Stuart Feldman saying that “This is a great example of an industry-transforming technology arising from highly theoretical research”. Needless to say that the whole Formal Methods community and in particular the International Workshop on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS) considers the prize as a great recognition of their incessant efforts on theoretical research and on technology transfer of the resulting techniques to industrial reality. Besides the enormous progress that has been made over the last decades in finding ways to efficiently encode the often huge state space that models of industrial problems give rise to, there has been much work on extending the technique to allow also for the analysis of quantitative aspects of system models. Examples of these extensions are the development of real-time model checking techniques resulting in tools like UPPAAL [10] and KRONOS [3], but more recently, also

concentration of damage produced during ion irradiation in the respective material. Consequently, the investigation of ion-beam induced damage formation is an indispensable part in the field of ion beam physics.
The fundamentals of ion-solid interaction, ion-beam induced damage formation in a broad variety of materials and theoretical description of damage formation have been subject of intensive studies of a large number of research groups around the world. This resulted in an enormous and still growing number of scientific papers. Various excellent monographs about ion beam physics appeared in recent years. Apart from the numerous scientific papers and monographs on the one hand and pure textbooks on the other, a comprehensive description of the theory of ion stopping in matter, a summary of models and the concepts that have been developed over time for characterisation of damage evolution as well as an overview of the state-of-the-art knowledge on damage formation in various classes of materials is still missing. With the present book we aim at filling this gap.
The book is organised in four parts. Part I provides the physical basics of ionsolid interaction. This includes a complete treatment of the theory of ion stopping in materials, i.e. the treatment of nuclear and electronic energy loss processes. Two further chapters give an overview about existing models for the description of damage formation due to electronic and nuclear interaction, respectively. If possible the general concepts are compared to each other and illustrated with real examples. The last chapter of this part is devoted to the physical basics of ion-beam induced synthesis of nanostructures. Part II deals with damage formation, amorphization and (re)crystallisation of semiconductors and ceramics, i.e. of covalent-ionic materials, due to nuclear energy deposition. The effect of high electronic energy deposition in solids is the topic of Part III. Structural modifications and phase transformations in crystalline insulators, metals and semiconductors are summarised. Additionally one chapter of this part reports on effects of electronic energy deposition in amorphous semiconductors. The final part, Part IV, presents selected applications of ion beams. Here the focus is on shaping and modification of nanoparticles and nanostructures and on the use of ion-beam induced effects for modification of optical materials.
It should be mentioned that not all existing literature could be taken into consideration in detail, but the contents of the various chapters are initially based on scientific results of the authors and their groups. Additional references to works of other authors are integrated. Besides well-established experimental results also possible limitations in their interpretation and open problems are addressed. In this respect the book should be suitable as material for special courses for graduate, postgraduate and Ph.D. students. Additionally it can be used as a source of information for researchers who are interested in this field.
Finally we feel the need to thank all co-authors who participated in the project with their valuable and highly interesting contributions. With extreme sadness we had to take note of the early death of our colleague, Mark C. Ridgeway, who significantly contributed not only to this book but to the field of ion beam physics in general. We shall always honour his memory.