Ion Beam Deposition

Abstract

Ion beam processing of materials has a tradition at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that is as old as the laboratory itself. Consequently, when we began looking for a competitive way to participate in the excitement and new physics beginning to emerge from the fabrication and study of artificially structured materials, it was natural to look for a growth technique that incorporated ion beam processing. Our division, the Solid State Division, has a variety of ion implantation and ion beam analysis accelerators which are integrated with pulsed-laser sources into ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) surface analysis and processing chambers. These facilities allow us to do ion beam and laser processing of materials in UHV at temperatures from liquid helium to several hundred degrees centigrade and to study these alterations in situ by a variety of ion beam (ion scattering, ion channeling, nuclear reactions, etc.) and surface analysis (low energy electron diffraction, Auger, etc.) techniques. Since isotope separation has been done continually at ORNL for almost 45 years, the idea and advantages for altering this technique to do materials fabrication in UHV were immediately obvious. In the following article we will briefly review the history of the ion beam deposition (IBD) concept, describe our preliminary apparatus, and point out the inherent advantages of IBD for fabricating and studying artificially structured materials. Recent results obtained by IBD will be presented.