Modelling of Multi-Ion-Beam Reactive Cosputtering for Metal Oxide Thin Films

Very recently a new technique named multi-ion-bram reactive cosputtering(MIBRECS) was developed for preparing multi-component metal oxide thin films. Epitaxial or highly oriented (Pb,La) TiO3 thin films sputtered from pure metals of lead, titanium and lathanium were deposited by using this technique. In order to consummate the technique and to study the mechanism of reactive cosputtering, a general model of multi-ion-beam reactive cosputter-ing was proposed for the first time based on the well-known gas kinetics under stable sputtering circumstances, and a computer numerical simulation of the model was carried out with the parameters adopted in our experiments. The relationships among the sputtering ratioes of the targets, and the coverage ratioes of simple substances and oxides of the target metals on substrate surface with the total reactive gas flux and the densities of the sputtering ion beam were obtained respectively, and the hysteresis effect of the characteristic of reactive sputtering and the interactions during multi-ion-beam reactive cosputtering processes were also obtained. The numerical simulation results are at least qualitively in agreement with the experiments.