Low-Energy Ion/Surface Interactions During Vapor-Phase Film Growth For Manipulating Microchemistry and Microstructure at the Atomic Level

Abstract

Low-energy (≤ 200 eV) ion irradiation during crystal growth from the vapor phase can be used to provide new chemical reaction pathways, modify film-growth kinetics, and, hence, controllably alter the physical properties of films deposited by a variety of techniques. The latter includes sputter deposition, ion plating, plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition (PA-CVD), primary-ion deposition (PID), and molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE) using accelerated beam sources. Ion/surface interaction effects such as ion-induced chemistry, trapping, recoil implantation, preferential sputtering, collisional mixing, enhanced diffusion, and alteration in segregation behavior are used to interpret and model experimental results concerning the effects of low-energy particle bombardment on nucleation and growth kinetics, elemental incorporation probabilities, compositional depth distributions, and the growth of metastable phases. Review articles on various aspects of ion irradiation during film growth including effects on nucleation and growth kinetics [1-4], microstructural evolution [4], preferred orientation and stress [2], elemental incorporation probabilities [1-3], dopant incorporation and depth distributions [5], and the synthesis of metastable semiconducting alloys [1-3,6] are available. Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics growth simulations have also been reviewed [4]. In this extended abstract, some of the key features of low-energy ion/surface interactions are outlined and new results are described.