A study of the relative thermal stability of perfect and faulted dislocation loops formed during annealing of preamorphized silicon wafers has been carried out. A series of transmission electron microscopy experiments has been designed to study the influence of the ion dose, the annealing ambient and the proximity of a free surface on the evolution of both types of loops. Samples were implanted with either 150 keV Ge+ or 50 keV Si+ ions to a dose of 2×1015 cm−2 and annealed at 900 °C in N2, N2O, and O2. The calculations of formation energy of both types of dislocation loops show that, for defects of the same size, faulted dislocation loops (FDLs) are more energetically stable than perfect dislocation loops (PDLs) if their diameter is smaller than 80 nm and vice versa. The experimental results have been analyzed within the framework of the Ostwald ripening of two existing populations of interstitial defects. It is found that the defect ripening is nonconservative if the surface is close to the end of range defect layer or if the sample is oxidized during annealing. In both cases, the knowledge of the formation energy of both types of dislocation loops allows a realistic estimate of the interstitial flux towards and from the surface, respectively, during annealing, in agreement with the experimental results. During a conservative ripening process, a direct correspondence exists between the formation energy of the two defect families and the number of atoms bound to them. In this case, the relative stability of FDLs and PDLs depends on the initial supersaturation of Si interstitial atoms created during implantation. © 2000 American Institute of Physics.