Silicon and gallium arsenide single crystals were cleaned in high vacuum by very low energy ion bombardment. High currents (up to 1 mA/cm2) were produced by a triplasmatron source down to energies of 50 eV. In situ Auger analyses showed that Si and normalGaAs clean surfaces are obtained at room temperature for bombarding energies as low as 70 and 50 eV, respectively. The incorporation of bombarding ions and the bombardment‐induced disorder were studied ex situby Rutherford backscattering and channeling. For silicon, the incorporation (Ar or Xe) increases linearly with bombarding energy while the Auger signal saturates above 200 eV. This result indicates that at high energies, ions are incorporated at greater depths than the sampling depth of the Auger technique. For normalGaAs , ion incorporation takes place only above 200 eV. The bombardment‐induced disorder increases with the bombarding energy. Above 200 eV, a strong correlation was observed between incorporation and disorder, demonstrating that the latter was stabilized by the incorporated ions. However, at very low energies, a significant disorder remains ( 1016 normaland 5×1015 normalatom/cm2 , for Si and normalGaAs , respectively) for a very small concentration of incorporated ions, indicating the presence of “intrinsic disorder” related to the sputtering mechanism. No influence of the beam current on bombardment‐induced incorporation or disorder was detected. For silicon, at very low bombarding energies, the disorder increases with the sample temperature during bombardment, with a noticeable effect already observed at 100°C. This is due to bombardment‐enhanced diffusion of the ions and associated damage stabilization. At higher bombarding energies, no temperature dependence was observed because the range of bombarding ions was greater than the diffusion length.

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