Irradiation with highly charged ions: impact of the kinetic and potential energy on particle emission

Abstract Ion irradiation is established as a strong tool for tailored modifications of solid materials on the nanometer scale. Although experimental results show that these modifications depend on the ion's kinetic and potential energy deposition at the irradiated surface and within the material, the dynamics of the deposition processes are still unknown. Especially for semiconducting targets, models addressing the dynamics of ion-solid-interaction differ from each other, even though they lead to similar final states of ion irradiated targets. We present time-of-flight secondary neutral mass spectrometry studies on the influence of the potential and kinetic energy on the W sputter yield of a semiconducting WS 2 bulk crystal. In our studies we used highly charged Xe ions with potential energies between 12 keV and 39 keV and kinetic energies spanning from 20 keV to 260 keV. Our experiments show a linear dependence of the sputter yield on both the kinetic and potential energy in these ranges. The influence of the potential energy on particle emission is found to be stronger than the influence of the kinetic energy.