I have sputtered my samples with 43nm gold (Au). My substrate was PDMS grating. But the color of the reflection light is almost green and I can't excite surface plasmons (there is no dip in reflection for p-polarized light) and the target after sputtering turn to black. Could anyone tell me please, where is the problem? and how can I solve it?
(Before that, I sputtered the same sample by other sputtering device and there were not any problem with the color of the reflection light and excitation of surface plasmons.)
I used DC sputtering in both cases.
Hello!
Sounds like you are having a problem with your inert gas supply. Did you flush your system with the inert gas and supply a sufficient pressure during sputtering. A pre-sputtering onto a shutter should be done to remove the contaminated material from the target.
If your gold target turns black I imagine your PDMS has been decomposing into hydrocarbons (PDMS contains CH3 groups) and turned into carbon when these CH3 fragments get hit by the Ar+ ions on the target. Especially with DC sputtering acceleration voltages can be very high for the electrons impinging on the substrate causing decomposition of PDMS. If you want to make sure this is the mechanism you can do RGA analyses during or after sputtering and you should see considerably amounts of peaks related to carbon (amu12) and CH3 (amu 13,14,15).
Hi Nasrin,
Outgassing from the PDMS during the ignition of the plasma and during the deposition may cause problems. One solution is to avoid sticky tape or bubbles and instead to used vacuum friendly object such as Kapton tape.
Hopefully you can get the problem resolved soon.
Huilong
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