Electron induced dissociation of trimethyl (methylcyclopentadienyl) platinum (IV): Total cross section as a function of incident electron energy

Abstract

The total cross section has been measured for the electron induced dissociation of trimethyl (methylcyclopentadienyl) platinum (IV) [MeCpPt(IV)Me3], a Pt precursor often used in focused electron beam induced processing (FEBIP), for incident electron energies ranging between 3–3 keV. Measurements were performed for the precursor in the adsorbed state under ultrahigh vacuum conditions. The techniques used in this study were temperature programmed desorption, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. Two surfaces were used in these experiments, amorphous carbon overlayers containing embedded Pt atoms (a:C-Pt), formed by the electron decomposition of the Pt precursor, and atomically clean Au. The results from these three experiments revealed a comparatively low total cross section at 8 eV (4.2±0.3×10−17 cm2 on the a:C-Pt and 1.4±0.1×10−17 cm2 on the Au) that increases with increasing incident electron energy, reaching a maximum at around 150 eV (4.1±0.5×10−16 cm2 on the a:C-Pt and 2.3±0.2×10−16 cm2 on the clean Au), before decreasing at higher incident electron energies, up to 3000 eV. Differences in the measured cross sections between Au and a:C-Pt surfaces demonstrate that the substrate can influence the reaction cross section of adsorbed species. Temperature programmed desorption was also used to measure the adsorption energy of MeCpPt(IV)Me3, which was found to depend on both the substrate and the adsorbate coverage. The work in this paper demonstrates that surface science techniques can be used to quantitatively determine the total cross section of adsorbed FEBIP precursors for electron induced dissociation as a function of incident electron energy. These total cross section values are necessary to obtain quantitatively accurate information from FEBIP models and to compare the reaction efficiencies of different precursors on a quantitative basis.