Change in yhe Optical Properties of Sapphire Induced by Ion Implantation

Abstract

ABSTRACTWe have studied the formation of nano-crystals, after implantation of 2.0 MeV gold, 1.5 MeV silver, 160 keV copper and 160 keV tin into single crystal of A12O3. We also studied the change in the linear optical properties of the implanted Al2O3 before and after subsequent annealing by measuring the increase in resonance optical absorption. Applying Doyle's theory and the results obtained from Rutherford backscattering spectrometry (RBS) as well as the full width half maximum of the absorption band from Optical Absorption Photospectrometry (OAP), we measured the average size of the metallic clusters for each sample after heat treatment. The formation and crystallinity of the nanoclusters were also confirmed using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) technique.