| AVS 61st International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Applied Surface Science | Thursday Sessions |
| Session AS-ThP |
| Session: | Applied Surface Science Poster Session |
| Presenter: | Vincent Smentkowski, General Electric Global Research Center |
| Authors: | V. Smentkowski, General Electric Global Research Center H. Piao, General Electric Global Research Center C.A. Moore, XEI Scientific |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
The surface of as received samples is often contaminated with adsorbed layers of hydrocarbons. These surface contaminants can attenuate or mask underlying species of interest, inhibiting or compromising accurate analysis. In-situ ion beam sputtering is often used to remove the outer layer of a sample surface and thus remove contaminants, however this erosion process is inherently destructive and can alter the surface of interest. Moreover there are also many materials that can not be cleaned using monoatomic ion beam sputtering as the material(s) may decompose and deposit a layer of fragments onto the outer surface of the material to be analyzed. Recently gas cluster ion beams (GCIB) have been developed1,2, which allows for depth profile analysis of organic layers with minimal degradation3 (and references therein). GCIBs have also been used for low damage surface cleaning4,5,6. A non line-of-sight protocol which is able to clean large (mm or greater) areas is desired. We recently demonstrated that ambient air plasma processing can be used to clean the outer surface of samples7, however ambient air plasma treatment can result in oxidation of the material. In this presentation we report our first attempts at in-situ plasma cleaning of samples using Ar prior to XPS and ToF-SIMS analysis. We compare Ar plasma cleaning with air plasma cleaning, and report key findings.
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