Study of the cascading effect on photon emission from sputtered excited carbon atoms and ions

A graphite surface was bombarded by 10 keV Ar+ ions and intensities of three carbon spectral lines (CI-247.9 nm, CI-283.7 nm and CII-251.2 nm) originating from the sputtered excited carbon atoms and ions were measured as a function of the distance from the target. It is shown that shape of the intensity decay curves was affected by filling up of the upper levels of these transitions via cascade process. In order to identify these cascading transitions the cascade correction was applied to the data. It was found that the prominent cascade transitions to upper levels of three given transitions were respectively from the 4p1S0, 3d2D3/2 and 3p2D5/2 levels.