Tuning the quality of nanoscale ripple patterns by sequential ion-beam sputtering

It is demonstrated that the quality of nanoscale ripple patterns on silicon surfaces can be substantially improved by applying sequential ion-beam sputtering. A flat silicon surface is sputtered at an intermediate incident angle which leads to the spontaneous formation of a periodic ripple pattern with 25 nm periodicity oriented normal to the direction of the incident ion beam. After rotating the sample by an azimuthal angle of 90, the surface is sputtered parallel to the ripples under grazing incidence. At the low fluences applied in this second step, no ripple pattern oriented parallel to the ion beam forms. However, due to geometrical shadowing and preferential erosion of pattern defects, grazing incidence sputtering enhances the order and regularity of the ripple pattern. The quality of the ripple pattern is assessed by evaluating its normalized density of topological defects which is determined from atomic force microscopy images. During grazing incidence ion sputtering, the normalized defect density is found to decrease exponentially with the applied ion fluence. It is shown that in this way the defect density of the initial ripple pattern can be reduced by at least 40% while keeping its periodicity approximately constant. Numerical integrations of the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation are in good qualitative agreement with the experimental results and suggest that the observed reduction in the density of pattern defects during sequential ion-beam sputtering is a universal effect present in a large variety of experimental systems.