Paper PS+SS-TuA8
Illuminating the Black Box: Plasma-Surface Interactions at the Atomic Scale

Tuesday, October 31, 2017, 4:40 pm, Room Ballroom B

This talk pays tributes to Harold Winters’s seminal contributions in the field of plasma etching of silicon-based materials and metals. Inspired by one of the earliest papers of Harold Winters, where he presented a framework for understanding plasma etching by treating the plasma as a "pseudo-black-box" to provide a semi-quantitative understanding of plasma etching effects such as loading, this talk presents a generalized methodology, combining thermodynamic assessment and kinetic verification of surface reactions, to further illuminate the black box in an effort to tailor plasma-surface interactions for a wide range of materials. This talk does not attempt to review all of Harold Winters’s work but focus on his work in metal etch and how that foundational knowledge helps guide the fundamental research in these areas to further advancements in tailoring the plasma-surface interactions to achieve desirable etch efficacy and selectivity of metals at the atomic scale.