Alloys under irradiation

During the last two decades, some effort has been devoted to establishing a phenomenology for alloys under irradiation. Theoretically, the effects of the defect supersaturation, sustained defect fluxes and ballistic mixing on solid solubility under irradiation can now be formulated in a unified manner, at least for the most simple cases: coherent phase transformations and nearest-neighbor ballistic jumps. Even under such restrictive conditions, several intriguing features documented experimentally can be rationalized, sometimes in a quantitative manner and simple qualitative rules for alloy stability as a function of irradiation conditions can be formulated. A quasi-thermodynamic formalism can be proposed for alloys under irradiation. However, this point of view has limits illustrated by recent computer simulations.