Pulsed ion beam methods for in situ characterization of diamond film deposition processes
- Argonne National Lab., IL (United States)
- Ionwerks Corp., Houston, TX (United States)
- Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States). Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering
Diamond and diamond-like carbon (DLC) have properties which in principle make them ideally suited to a wide variety of thin-film applications. Their widespread use as thin films, however, has been limited for a number of reasons related largely to the lack of understanding and control of the nucleation and growth processes. Real-time, in situ studies of the surface of the growing diamond film are experimentally difficult because these films are normally grown under a relatively high pressure of hydrogen, and conventional surface analytical methods require an ultrahigh vacuum environment. It is believed, however, that the presence of hydrogen during growth is necessary to stabilize the corrugated diamond surface structure and thereby prevent the formation of the graphitic phase. Pulsed ion beam-based analytical methods with differentially pumped ion sources and particle detectors are able to characterize the uppermost atomic layer of a film during, growth at ambient pressures 5-7 orders of magnitude higher than other surface-specific analytical methods. We describe here a system which has been developed for the purpose of determining the hydrogen concentration and bonding sites on diamond surfaces as a function of sample temperature and ambient hydrogen pressure under hot filament CVD growth conditions. It is demonstrated that as the hydrogen partial pressure increases, the saturation hydrogen coverage of the surface of a CVD diamond film increases, but that the saturation level depends on the atomic hydrogen concentration and substrate temperature.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States); Department of Defense, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-31-109-ENG-38
- OSTI ID:
- 90412
- Report Number(s):
- ANL/CHM/CP-84380; CONF-950454-4; ON: DE95012275; CNN: Contract DAAL 03-92-C-0002
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 22. international AVS conference on metallurgical coatings and thin films (ICMCTF-22), San Diego, CA (United States), 24-28 Apr 1995; Other Information: PBD: [1995]
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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