Modification of Thin Film Growth using Glancing-Angle Ions

Abstract

This paper reviews the use of glancing-angle ions for modifying surfaces and thin film growth processes. Ions impinging on a flat surface at oblique incidence angles are mostly reflected without penetrating, providing very low sputtering rates along with minimal damage and implantation. They also provide a unique selectivity, where ion energy is coupled to defects or rough portions of the surface, while flat portions are essentially unaffected. This allows one to clean contaminated surfaces and smoothen rough surfaces, with little or no ion damage. In addition, recent results indicate that the ion energy couples directly to adatoms during epitaxial growth of GaAs(001). This was observed by a decrease in the time required for diffusion across terraces on a vicinal GaAs surface, as the glancing-angle Ar ion current was increased. It was also found that ion-enhanced diffusion shifted the growth mode from two-dimensional island nucleation to step-flow growth, and resulted in flatter growth surfaces. Finally, glancing-angleions can be used to introduce biaxial texture into polycrystalline GaAs films.