IUVSTA 15th International Vacuum Congress (IVC-15), AVS 48th International Symposium (AVS-48), 11th International Conference on Solid Surfaces (ICSS-11)
    Nanometer Structures Thursday Sessions
       Session NS-ThP

Paper NS-ThP11
An Apparatus for Deposition of Size-selected Clusters and Fabrication of Cluster-assembled Films

Thursday, November 1, 2001, 5:30 pm, Room 134/135

Session: Poster Session
Presenter: N. Tarras-Wahlberg, Chalmers Univ. of Tech. and Göteborg Univ., Sweden
Authors: N. Tarras-Wahlberg, Chalmers Univ. of Tech. and Göteborg Univ., Sweden
M. Andersson, Chalmers Univ. of Tech. and Göteborg Univ., Sweden
A. Rosén, Chalmers Univ. of Tech. and Göteborg Univ., Sweden
Correspondent: Click to Email
We present the design of an apparatus for deposition of size-selected metal clusters. The clusters are fabricated in a laser vaporization source. It consists of a cavity where pulsed light from a Nd:YAG or excimer laser vaporizes metal atoms into a continuous flow of He atoms at a pressure of 10 - 50 mbar and clusters are formed. The cluster-buffer gas mixture exits the cavity through a nozzle (0.5 - 1 mm diameter) and the beam passes a differential pumping stage until it reaches the vacuum chambers for characterization and deposition. At several positions along the cluster beam quartz crystal microbalances and Faraday cups can be inserted to measure the total mass and ion yields. In the first vacuum chamber, just outside the nozzle the deposition rate is high, e.g. 4 Å/s of non size-selected Fe-clusters at 10 Hz repetition rate. A time-of-flight mass spectrometer is used to monitor the cluster production and to characterize the cluster size distribution, and a quadrupole mass filter will be used for size selection and deposition of monodisperse clusters. In previous deposition experiments we have made iron cluster films on HOPG and characterized their magnetic properties [C. Johansson et al., Nanostr. Mater. 12 (1999) 287].