Ion beams for information technology

Taking the advancing of accelerator technologies, a variety of ions (all stable elements and some radioactive elements) in a wide energy range from eV to GeV can be produced and injected into targets. Using the chemical effect of injected ions, “ion implantation" has been well established to dope semiconductors and integrated into the standard microelectronics production line in Si-chip technology. Ion irradiation refers to using other effects rather than the doping effect in materials and has been used for defect (or lifetime) engineering in microelectronics. Moreover, ion beams are also instrument for the analysis of solid state surfaces to get the information about the composition and impurity lattice location. In this talk, I will give some examples for the application of ion beams in information technologies. The following topics will be included: (1) Doping semiconductors well above the solid solidity limits: by doing so the semiconductors can be ferromagnetic or superconducting [1-5]. (2) Defect engineering in SiC: defects can carry magnetic moments giving possibilities for ferromagnetic coupling in SiC as well as for manipulating single defect center for quantum technology [6, 7]. (3) Defect engineering in oxides: it can introduce uniaxial strain and change the properties rather than by choosing different growth substrates [8, 9]. It is worthy to note that ion beam technology has been well developed for applications at wafer (450 mm) scale. Once the proof-of-concept is done, these applications mentioned above can be easily transferred to industries.

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[4] M. Wang, et al., Phys. Rev. Applied. 11, 054039 (2019).
[5] S. Prucnal, et al., Phys. Rev. Materials 3, 054802 (2019).
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[7] C. Kasper, et al., arXiv:1908.06829v1 (2019).
[8] P. Pandey, et al., APL Materials 6, 066109 (2018).
[9] C. Wang, et al., Topological Hall effect in single thick SrRuO3 layers induced by defect engineering, submitted (2019).