The present work provides an innovative approach to the near-surface slow-positron-beam (SPB) study of structural materials exposed to ion-beam irradiation. This approach enables the use of variable-energy positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy (PALS) to characterise a wide range of microstructural damage along the ion implantation profile. In a typical application of the SPB PALS technique, positron lifetime is used to provide qualitative information on the size of vacancy clusters as a function of the positron energy, i.e., the probing depth of the spectrometer. This approach is limited to a certain defect concentration above which the positron lifetime gets saturated. In our experiments, we investigated the back-diffusion of positrons and their annihilation at the surface. The probability of such an event is characterised by the positron diffusion length, and it depends on the density of lattice defects, even in the saturation range of the positron lifetime. Until now, the back-diffusion experiments were reported only in connection with Doppler broadening spectroscopy (DBS) of positron-annihilation radiation. To verify the validity of the used approach, we compared the obtained results on helium-implanted Fe9Cr alloy and its oxide dispersion strengthened variant with the transmission electron microscopy and "conventional" slow positron DBS analysis.
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