Ion Beam Technology

Abstract

Energetic ion beams and related tools are powerful instruments for research and a wide area of fabrication and materials characterization techniques. They were basically developed to probe and to understand the nuclear structure, but later on, in the past few decades, they have given rise to many key techniques for materials engineering and analysis. For example, ion implantation has become the main technique for semiconductor doping in modern microelectronic technology while Rutherford backscattering (RBS), channeling (c-RBS), medium energy ion scattering (MEIS), ERDA, proton-induced X- and γ-ray emission (PIXE and PIGE), and nuclear reaction analysis (NRA) have emerged as powerful and unique tools for surface and interface analysis. For processing and analysis of many materials a wide range of ion species, ion energies, and ion currents have been explored. To demonstrate the universal nature of ion beams in materials processing and analysis, Fig. 3.1 shows the different applications of ion beam techniques in a map of ion energies versus ion beam currents.