Near-non-preferential sputtering of multicomponent solids as an effective way for production of dense cone shape arrays on a sputtered surface

Sputtering rate of lead, tin and germanium tellurides with low energy argon ions

“…(see, for example, reviews [2,3] and references). Our research over the last few years have been shown that all of this is fully applied also to IV-VI semiconductors PbTe, SnTe, and GeTe [4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. In particular, we found that the specificity of formation of the sputtered surface of PbTe crystals due to the processes of re-deposition of sputtered species leads to i) the phenomenon of aperiodical oscillations of Pb and Te sputtering [4,5]; ii) the morphology of the sputtering surfaces and the differences in the constituent masses of PbTe, SnTe, and GeTe cause the changes in the relative detection factor of the compound intrinsic constituents, due to which there is no unambiguous relationship between the ratio of concentrations of the telluride components and the ratio of the intensity of their sputtered signals; to solve the problem of quantitative determination of composition, it is necessary to introduce an adjustment to the magnitude of the relative detection factor, which depends on the sputtered surface morphology, the Ar + ions energy bombarding the surface and must be determined separately in each individual case [6][7][8]; iii) sputtering by low energy Ar + ions causes amorphisation effect on the surface of SnTe and GeTe crystals [9]; iv) near-non-preferential sputtering of SnTe surface leads to formation of sputtered surface always covered with a dense array of cones of nanometer range of height [10].…”

Formation of submicron cone-shaped surface morphology under ion-beam sputtering of nanostructured nickel

“…Of great practical interest are metals with ion−induced cone−shaped surface morphology; such metals may be considered as, e. g., field cathodes [3,4], discharge device electrodes [5], plasma−facing components in thermonuclear facility [6,7], etc. Formation of cones depends on the radiation fluence, as well as on the material, temperature and crystallographic orientation of grains [8][9][10][11]. A significant role is played also by stress states on the metal surface [12,13].…”