Energy sharing and sputtering in low-energy collision cascades

Abstract

Using a non-linear transport equation to describe the energy-sharing process in an isotropic collision cascade, we have numerically calculated sputtered particle velocity spectra for several very low energy (<10 eV) primary recoil distributions. Our formulation of the sputtering process is essentially that used in the linear model and our equations yield the familiar linear model results in the appropriate limit. Discrepancies between our calculations and the linear model results in other cases may be understood by considering the effects of the linear model assumptions on the sputtering yield at very low energies. Our calculations are also compared with recent experimental results investigating ion-explosion sputtering. The results of this comparison support the conclusion that in insulators sputtering is initiated by very low energy recoil atoms when the energy of the incident beam is high enough that the stopping power is dominated by the electronic contribution. The calculations also suggest that energy spectra similar to those for evaporation may result from non-equilibrium processes but that the apparent temperatures of evaporation are not related in a simple way to any real temperature within the target.