Heavy ion Rutherford backscattering with a time of flight detector system

Heavy Ion Rutherford Backscattering Spectroscopy uses a beam of energetic ions to probe the composition of a surface or thin film. It has been used on a variety of systems to solve a variety of problems. In this thesis we describe a silicon surface barrier detector system and a time of flight detector system that have been built and used for several examples. These include, for example, the concentration depth profiling of thin-film high-critical-temperature superconductors and indium gallium arsenide quantum wells and superlattices. Temperature dependent electronic sputtering of VO2 has been observed by measuring the sputtered vanadium with this technique. Software has been developed to analyze Heavy Ion RBS and TOF Heavy Ion RBS rapidly. The usefulness of the Heavy Ion RBS technique in general and of TOF Heavy Ion RBS in particular has been amply demonstrated by these examples, and the potential of the method for solving other analytical problems has been enhanced by the improvements we have made