Crystal-orientation-dependent physical sputtering from four elemental metals

Abstract

Physical sputtering and its dependence on crystal orientation is well-known, but crystallinity of the target is neither commonly considered in simulations nor when publishing experimental values for its yield. Due to the recent development of detector technology and therefore of crystal orientation mapping, a measuring technique has been established to obtain the physical sputtering yield for an extensive number of orientations of polycrystalline specimens. In this work, yields for two bcc metals (W and Mo) and two fcc metals (Cu and Pt) for impacting Ga ions with 30 keV and around 5 keV energy were determined experimentally and are compared with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations in a recently established two level approach and with binary collision approximation (BCA) simulations. The agreement between experimental yields and simulations is excellent regarding distribution in the angular space and reasonable regarding absolute values. As expected, the variation in angular space among the materials with the same crystal lattice structure is minor.