Surface Modification of Dielectric Substrates by Broad Beams of High-Energy Atoms of Inert Gases

Alexander Metel,Enver Mustafaev,Marina Volosova,Yury Melnik,Sergey Grigoriev

doi:10.3390/technologies8030043

Alexander Metel, Enver Mustafaev + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/technologies8030043

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Abstract

We present a new method to generate a neutral beam for surface treatment of materials by fast atoms of inert gases. The new method allows for treatment at lower pressures enlarging the scope for glow discharge applications. To generate the monoenergetic neutral beam, a grid composed of parallel plates is placed inside a vacuum chamber, a glow discharge plasma was generated, and a beam was formed by pulsing the grid to 30 kV to extract ions from the glow discharge. The ions were then neutralized by small-angle scattering at the surfaces of the grid. By applying the high voltage for 50 µs with a repetition frequency of 50 Hz, heating of the target could be limited to 100 °C (instead of 700 °C when running continuously). We present results showing the uniformity of the created beam and its energy distribution using Doppler-shift measurement. Finally, we show friction measurement of treated alumina pieces as a working example of an application of this technology.

Highlights

Ion implantation is a method for injecting high-energy atoms into the surface of a solid to modify its near-surface layer [1,2,3,4,5]
At the gas pressure p ~ 0.5 Pa switching on the discharge power supply results in establishing the hollow cathode glow discharge with voltage amounting to ~400 V
Application to conductive products immersed in plasma of high-voltage pulses at the gas pressure of ~0.01 Pa enables the plasma immersion ion implantation for various products [30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39]

Summary

Introduction

Ion implantation is a method for injecting high-energy atoms into the surface of a solid to modify its near-surface layer [1,2,3,4,5]. To generate the ion beams, accelerators of charged particles have been developed They are characterized by a comparatively high cost and long processing time [12,13,14]. The energy of ions bombarding the product diminishes This is due to charge exchange collisions [17,18] in the space charge sheath [19] between the product and the plasma. It is impossible to apply the pulses to dielectric products For this reason, broad beam sources of ions [20,21,22,23,24] or fast neutral atoms [25,26] are used to treat them. Allow processing of the substrates with larger surface areas

Experimental

Results

Discussion