Nitrogen atom energy distributions in a hollow-cathode planar sputtering magnetron

Abstract

Energy distributions of N atoms in a hollow-cathode planar sputtering magnetron were obtained by use of optical emission spectroscopy. A characteristic line, N I 8216.3 Å, well-separated from molecular nitrogen emission bands, was identified. Jansson's nonlinear spectral deconvolution method, refined by minimization of χ w 2 , was used to obtain the optimal deconvolved spectra. These showed nitrogen atom energies from 1 eV to beyond 500 eV. Based on comparisons with VFTRIM results, we propose that the energetic N atoms are generated from N 2 + ions after these ions are accelerated through the sheath and dissociatively reflect from the cathode.

Electron energy distributions in a magnetized inductively coupled plasma

“…For example, due to the finite differencing method used, each component of electron flux / i;j at a location (i, j) in the structured numerical mesh is a function of the electrostatic potentials at that mesh point and all adjacent mesh points, which produces a 9-point numerical molecule and 9 terms in the sum over Jacobian elements in Eq. (10). The Jacobian element for U iþ1;j is derived from…”

“…6,7 Although these plasmas have been developed for different materials processing applications-etching, deposition, implantation-the fundamental motivation behind using magnetic fields is controlling the spatial and energy distributions of electrons, ions, and neutrals. [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] Electron kinetics are often described as being local or nonlocal. Local electron kinetics is typically observed in high pressure systems where the electron energy relaxation length k e is smaller than the characteristic skin depth of the electromagnetic field, d, or chamber size L. 22 In non-local kinetics, k e is sufficiently large that the electron energy distribution (EED) based on total energy (kinetic energy plus potential energy) is essentially uniform across the chamber.…”

A comparative study of CrAlN films synthesized by dc and pulsed dc reactive magnetron facing target sputtering system with different pulse frequencies

“…It has been shown that film properties, such as high compressive stresses and high roughness can be explained by the energy of the incident species on the surface of the growing film [30,31]. It is shown that when the energy of the incident species on the film surface is low, their energy transfers to the surface of the growing film and affects the surface roughness [5,31,32].…”

Ti-Containing Cu₃N Nanostructure Thin Films: Experiment and Simulation on Reactive Magnetron Sputter-Assisted Nitridation

“…The energetic N's are produced from N + 2 ion flux after these ions are accelerated through the cathode sheath and are dissociatively reflected from cathode [9]. Energy reflection 0093-3813 © 2015 IEEE.…”

“…The neutral N's reflected [9] from the surface of the single TiCu target and impinging on the growing film with enough energy (due to large TD) can produce atomic scale heating [13], [14] which decomposes the metastable Cu 3 N to copper and nitrogen. This results in another mechanism for copper phase appearance in deposited films at low nitrogen pressure.…”