Au Ion Induced Modification of C60 Thin Film Samples

Abstract

The present work reports phase transformations of thin films of C60 irradiated with 100 MeV 197Au8+ ions. This work is in continuation with our earlier work using 58Ni10+ and 16O6+ ions, to study the modification in C60 thin films. The study of C60 thin films using 197Au8+ ions, provides us enough additional data to investigate thoroughly the role of Se in causing phase transformations under different ion fluences. The Raman spectra indicate that swift heavy ion (SHI) irradiation results in several transformations of crystalline C60. At low fluences along with the fragmentation of C60 there is dimer/polymer formation. As fluence increases the dimer/polymer content first rises, optimizes, decreases and finally vanishes at very high fluences. At high fluences, all the C60 molecules as well as the polymer C60 break up, possibly resulting in nano-crystalline graphite embedded in amorphous carbon (a-C).