The influence of magnetic field on the cluster growth in a magnetron sputtering gas aggregation source

2025-03-01

PRE

João Coroa

Giuseppe Sanzone

Tibor Höltzl

Hailin Sun

Ewald Janssens

Jinlong Yin *

DOI：10.1016/j.surfcoat.2025.131892

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Abstract

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Clusters produced by physical methods in gas phase have yet to see widespread adoption due to low deposition rates, despite the benefits that they could bring to many applications. It is demonstrated in this study that unbalancing the magnetic field configuration of a magnetron within a sputtering gas aggregation source significantly enhances dimer formation and subsequent cluster growth. Based on experimental results obtained with four magnetic field configurations, along with ab initio simulations, we discussed various scenarios for dimer formation and proposed that the contribution of ArPd+ is essential for an increase in cluster throughput. We analysed the resulting plasma spatial distribution and demonstrated that the selected magnetic field configuration significantly influences the lifetime of ArPd+ particles. When their lifetime is long, more ArPd+ can react with another metal atom (Pd) and form other stable complexes (Pd2, Pd2+ or ArPd2+), a critical first step in cluster growth, increasing cluster throughput by a factor of 150-fold. The proposed mechanism might be material-independent as other metal-argon dimers (ArCu+, ArTi+ and ArCo+) have also been reported in the literature.

Keywords:

Gas aggregation source

Magnetron sputtering

Magnetic field

Palladium clusters

Cluster growth

Nanoparticles

Ab initio simulations

The influence of magnetic field on the cluster growth in a magnetron sputtering gas aggregation source

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