Ion beam mixing

Article By:

Tsaur, Bor-Yeu Lincoln Laboratories, Lexington, Massachusetts.

Last reviewed:January 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1036/1097-8542.351550

A process in which bombardment of a solid with a beam of energetic ions causes the intermixing of the atoms of two separate phases originally present in the near-surface region. In the well-established process of ion implantation, the ions are incident instead on a homogeneous solid, into which they are incorporated over a range of depths determined by their initial energy. In the simplest example of ion beam mixing, the solid is a composite consisting of a substrate and a thin film of a different material (Fig. 1a). Ions with sufficient energy pass through the film into the substrate, and this causes mixing of the film and substrate atoms through atomic collision processes (Fig. 1b). If the ion dose is large enough, the original film will completely disappear (Fig. 1c). This process may result in the impurity doping of the substrate, in the formation of an alloy or two-phase mixture, or in the production of a stable or metastable solid phase that is different from either the film or the substrate. See also: Ion implantation

The content above is only an excerpt.