ULTRA-LOW-ENERGY HIGH-CURRENT ION SOURCE

The technical objective of the project was to develop an ultra-low-energy, high-intensity ion source (ULEHIIS) for materials processing in high-technology fields including semiconductors, micro-magnetics and optics/opto-electronics. In its primary application, this ion source can be incorporated into the 4Wave thin-film deposition technique called biased target ion-beam deposition (BTIBD), which is a deposition technique based on sputtering (without magnetic field, i.e., not the typical magnetron sputtering). It is a technological challenge because the laws of space charge limited current (Child-Langmuir) set strict limits of how much current can be extracted from a reservoir of ions, such as a suitable discharge plasma. The solution to the problem was an innovative dual-discharge system without the use of extraction grids