Microscopic description of the thermalization process during pulsed laser deposition of aluminium in the presence of argon background gas

Abstract

The presence of background gases is typical in most pulsed laser deposition (PLD) applications and there is a need for methods which do not suffer from the oversimplified assumption of collisionless transfer of the target atoms onto the substrate in analytical descriptions. In this work, we give a microscopic description of a thermalization process by following the history of each ablated particle by Monte Carlo calculations. TRIM code (SRIM2010), which is capable of quantum mechanical treatment of ion–atom collisions, has been used in our simulations. Various kinetic parameters of ablated Al ions during target-to-substrate transfer have been calculated to demonstrate the efficient role of background gas atoms in thermalization of ions. Moreover, the growing parameters of interest in PLD have been calculated to achieve the optimal deposition conditions in the presence of a background gas. A base pressure of 1 × 10−1 Torr and 2–3 cm of target-to-substrate distance have been found to be the optimal conditions in PLD of Al in Ar gas environment. Our model can be used to obtain the first estimates of nonreactive PLD parameters, such as the background gas pressure and the target-to-substrate distance for the growth of even more complex materials in the presence of different background gases.

Preparation of Low Friction MoSex/nc-Mo Coatings Containing Spherical Mo Nanoparticles

“…The energy of these particles reaches several hundreds of eV. The buffer gas with the pressure greater or equal to 2 Pa considerably influences the dose of irradiation by high-energy atomic particles, as well as the energy and angle distributions of the atomic particles during deposition [19,20]. The bombardment can initiate a number of competitive processes on the surface and in the bulk of the MoSex/nc-Mo coating.…”

New raster-scanned <inline-formula><math display="inline" overflow="scroll"><mrow><msub><mrow><mi>CO</mi></mrow><mrow><mn mathvariant="bold">2</mn></mrow></msub></mrow></math></inline-formula> laser heater for pulsed laser deposition applications: design and modeling for homogenous substrate heating

“…10 The temperature of the substrate was allowed to stabilize for a period of ∼ 4 minutes between each measurement. A pressure of 0.1 Torr was maintained during measurements to accurately predict the temperature for typical PLD conditions.…”

“…3 Since an accurate measurement of the rotating substrate temperature is technically very difficult, this thermal modeling is the only way for designing and fixing the involved parameters such as the laser spot size and power or the laser scanning speed on the substrate. 9,10 Hence, most of the PLD practitioners tend to work with the disk-shaped substrates. In PLD, the ablated plasma plume possesses a high degree of azimuthal symmetry and keeps it during the transmission from the target to the substrate.…”

On the delayed emission from a laser-produced aluminum plasma under an argon environment

“…background pressure. [29][30][31][32] Investigation of plume dynamics in the background medium 33,34 has been performed by various groups to understand processes like dragging, 35 thermalization, 36 attenuation/ enhancement of optical emissions, 37 diffusion, 38 recombination, 39 generation of shock waves, 40 etc. in a vacuum where it expands adiabatically.…”