Abstract

Low-energy (< 500 eV) particle bombardment during film growth from the vapor phase has been shown to play an important and sometimes dominant role in controlling the growth kinetics and hence microstructure and physical properties of films deposited by glow discharge and ion beam sputtering, molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) using accelerated dopants, and plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition. Important ion/surface interaction effects include, trapping, preferential sputtering, collisional mixing, creation of preferential nucleation sites and enhancement of adatom mobilities. The effects which predominate during ion bombardment of the substrate and growing film depend primarily upon the energy, mass and flux of the projectiles, the substrate and film materials, orientation, and the film growth temperature.

© 1987 Optical Society of America