  A fast ion penetrating a solid creates a track of excitations. This can
produce displacements seen as an etched track, a process initially used to
detect energetic particles but now used to alter materials. From the seminal
papers by Fleischer et al. [Phys. Rev. 156, 353 (1967)] to the present [C.
Trautmann, S. Klaumunzer and H. Trinkaus, Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 3648 (2000)],
`Coulomb explosion' and thermal spike models are treated as conflicting models
for describing ion track effects. Here molecular dynamics simulations of
electronic-sputtering, a surface manifestation of ion track formation, show
that `Coulomb explosion' produces a `heat' spike so that these are early and
late aspects of the same process. Therefore, differences in scaling are due to
the use of incomplete spike models.

Materials Science