Abstract
Gas cluster ions accelerated to high kinetic energies can be used successfully for surface modification. The most impressive result of cluster ion irradiation appears to be a surface smoothing effect: a rough surface containing valleys and hills of average heights of the order of 100 Å becomes almost flat with the residual roughness reduced by a factor of 10. The Langevin dynamics based on the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation, combined with a Monte-Carlo procedure for crater formation, was used for simulation of the surface modification at cluster ion impacts. We found that for a crater size of the order of 20 Å, significant smoothing occurs after irradiation by approximately 103 cluster impacts; this was confirmed by experiment at dose of 10 13 ions cm −2. The rate of the smoothing process depends on the value of surface diffusion coefficients, and can be accelerated significantly if the lateral sputtering phenomenon is taken into account.
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