Morphology of surfaces bombarded with highly charged ions

The morphology of surfaces after erosion by ion sputtering show very different char-acteristics depending on the ion beam parameters and the material properties. The surface exposed to the ion beam can turn atomically smooth, stochastically or self-affine rough, or can evolve towards regular self-organised patterns, like periodic rip-ples or hexagonally ordered dots [1,2,3]. The structures of these patterns have small sizes in the range of 10 to 100 nm and show a high degree of ordering. Therefore, they have attracted strong interest recently as possible candidates for quantum struc-tures or as templates for deposition or etching processes [3,4].
On materials whose surface turns amorphous during the ion erosion the formation of the periodic patterns relies on at least two interplaying processes: roughening of the surface due to the local variation of sputtering yield and smoothing via diffusion proc-esses [5]. Therefore, the surface morphology depends strongly on the details of the energy deposition by the incoming ions and on the details of the surface diffusion.
At the atomic level, the atomic sputtering, the creation of surface defects, and the influence of the ion beam on surface diffusion processes play a decisive role for the morphology evolution. In the case of single charged ions, the energy deposition is mainly dissipated kinetically in a collision cascade which leads finally to the emission of the sputtered atoms and the creation of defects.
Multiple or highly charged ions carry in addition to their kinetic energy also “potential” energy which is the sum of the ionization energies for getting the higher charge state. Thus, a second energy deposition process takes place, i.e. the release of the poten-tial energy. This dissipation process is mainly electronic and takes place at the direct impact of the ions with the surface. For slow ions at high charge states the potential energy can exceed the kinetic energy thus dominating the ion-solid interaction. It has been demonstrated that at least 30% of the potential energy is retained in the surface and can induce electronic sputtering in the case of insulators [6,7].
We present first investigations of the effect of the potential energy deposition on the surface morphology of insulators and semiconductors. Special emphasis will be given on the characterisation of single ion impacts and the effect of the additional potential energy deposition on self-organised patterns.