Threshold and Efficiency for Perforation of 1nm Thick Carbon Nanomembranes with Slow Highly Charged Ions

Ion collision with surfaces leads to nano-structure formation usually by cumulative ef-fects. Large ion fluencies are needed to lead to observable topographic surface features. For special classes of ions, i.e. swift heavy ions or slow highly charged ions (HCI) already single ion impacts may give rise to structural changes with a lateral extent of a few nm. Desired sur-face-only modification, however, can solely be achieved by HCI due to the very localized re-lease of their potential energy.
Different kinds of surface structures have been observed on insulating [1] and semi-conducting surfaces [2]. All these studies have in common that a certain ion charge state or potential ener-gy threshold has to be exceeded in order to form nano-hillocks, nano-pits, nano-craters, or even sub-surface damage only visible after chemical etching [3]. For high ion charge states the effi-ciency for nano-structure formation is consid-ered to be 100%, i.e. every ion produces a struc-ture upon impact. However, an accurate fluence measurement necessary to determine the struc-turing yield for HCI irradiation is challenging, because of very low ion currents (fA-range). Also it is an open question how well defined the potential energy threshold is.
Here we show that transmission of HCI through 1nm thick carbon nanomembranes (CNM) and subsequent determination of their charge state distribution and energy loss [4] allows us to measure the ion-induced nano-structure for-mation yield much more accurately. Since these insulating membranes are a surface-only mate-rial and HCI energy deposition is limited typi-cally to the surface of a solid we consider this as a model system for insulating surfaces.
Figure 1 shows the efficiency for pore for-mation by single HCI impact as function of the incident charge state. It is obvious that a thresh-old exists at about Q = 28, where the yield in-creases from 0 to about 70%. For even higher charge states the efficiency increases to about 100% for Q = 40. Thus, only for sufficiently highly charged ions the structure formation yield may be considered to be 100%.