Improvement in ion beam quality for thin-film formation

Abstract

Low-energy ion beam technique is useful for the study on ion–surface interaction and deposition processes. In the low-energy ion beam system, ions are accelerated and decelerated to a desired energy just before deposition. The high-energy neutrals contained in the low-energy ion beam cannot be decelerated and make damage in the deposition film. By rejecting high-energy neutrals from a low-energy ion beam, improvement of the quality of the beam might be achieved. Thus, we modified the low-energy ion beam deposition system in order to reduce them. With this modification, the amount of high-energy Ar neutrals in a 100-eV Ar + ion beam was reduced to 0.5% in this work.