Radiation material science structures to fulfill their purpose, a firm understanding of the effect of radiation on materials is required in order to account for irradiation effects in design, to mitigate its effect by changing operating conditions, or to serve as a guide for creating new, more radiation-tolerant materials that can better serve their purpose. The types of radiation that can alter structural materials consist of neutrons, ions, electrons and gamma rays. All of these forms of radiation have the capability to displace atoms from their lattice sites, which is the fundamental process that drives the changes in structural metals.The inclusion of ions
Poynting–Robertson effect affecting dust grains from 1 µm to 1 mm in diameter. Larger dust is likely to collide with another object long before such drag can have an effect. Poynting initially gave a description of the effect in 1903 based on the "luminiferous aether" theory, which was superseded by the theories of relativity in 1905–1915. In 1937 Robertson described the effect in terms of general relativity. Robertson considered dust motion in a beam of radiation emanating from a point source. A. W. Guess later considered the problem for a spherical source of radiation and found that for particles far from the