Ion beam mixing in Fe/Si and Ta/Si bilayers: Possible effects of ion charges

Ion beam induced surface and interface engineering

“…Recent experiments shows ion beam mixing at Fe/Si bilayers with Ar 8+ ions produced amorphous FeSi 2 layers [400,227], while Ar 1+ ion irradiations led to polycrystalline β-FeSi 2 [74] and a higher mixing rate achieved for Ar 8+ ion irradiations in the Fe/Si system, as compared to Ar 1+ ions [401,402]. Moreover, the influence of IBM with inert ions on the structure, magnetic, magneto-optical, and optical properties of Fe/Si multilayered films (MLF's) is investigated [403,404] and found that the IBM results in a formation of metastable B2-phase Fe 2 Si with a perfect crystalline structure, a low coercivity and a Curie temperature of about 550 K. It was found that annealing at 720 K of the ion beam mixed Fe-Si MLF further destroys the layered structure at the bottom and also decomposes Fe 2 Si to form a metastable magnetically hard Fe 5 Si 3 phase and, presumably, Fe 3 Si.…”

Structural and electrical properties of swift heavy ion beam irradiated Co/Si interface

“…Dufour (Dufour et al 1993) was first to observe the mixing in Fe/Si multilayer and found a quasi-complete mixing using 650 MeV U ions. Though a substantial amount of work has been done in ion beam induced mixing for the formation of metal silicides (Masoud et al 2002;Milosavljevic et al 2002;Dhar et al 2003), they are mostly in low energy region where elastic collisions (nuclear stopping) are predominant. Recently, researchers have shown interest (Assmann et al 1998;Kraft et al 2002;Chaudhary et al 2004;Diva et al 2004) in atomic mixing, materials modification and phase changes using ion beam mixing of high energy where inelastic collisions or electronic stopping are responsible for the energy loss.…”