Amorphous silicon deposited by xenon ion beam assisted deposition

In this work, we present some properties of amorphous silicon deposited by ion beam assisted deposition (IBAD). The films were prepared using a Kauffman ion gun using xenon (Xe) gas to sputter a silicon target. Another ion gun was adopted to simultaneously bombard the film with Xe during the growth of the film with xenon in the 0–300 eV energy range. Rutherford backscattering (RBS) was used to determine the concentration of the implanted Xe atoms and the density of the films. It was observed that the implantation of Xe do not affect much the stress of the films, which is compressive and about −0.6 GPa for all samples. The concentration of implantation Xe reach a maximum at energy of about 50 eV decreasing as the ion energy increases. The density of the films follows the concentration of Xe, suggesting that the densification of the film is not due to a compactation process supplied by the Xe bombardment of the films, but rather due to the incorporation of a heavy atom into the matrix.