Hi,

if you want to know the enthalpy of a molecule that is formed by an etching particle that "graps" an atom/molecule from the surface of your polymers the resulting net enthalpy is just given by energy conservation:

Enet = Ereaction + Ebinding

meaning that the net enthalpy is just given by the difference of the energy in chemical reaction (this one has to be negative, since it is removed from the system "etching particle - etched particle") and the part of the energy that has to be "invested" for tearing out the particle from your surface, (i.e. the binding energy)

Thanks a lot for the answer. I would like to go a bit more specific about this. the answer you added holds good for simple chemical reactions. however, plasma functionalyzation and etching is associated with numerous steps. The removal of one CO molecule is not direct, which might happen only through multiple unknown steps during the plasma surface interactions. Do you think that still the energy required for the formation of this molecule remains the same? Probably the other side reactions on the surface can also largely affect the removal of the etch product. Is not it? i guess the enthalpy should be negative because of a couple of reasons. 1. the incoming particle has very high potential energy. 2. the carbon oxidation is highly exothermic.

Yep, my bad - of course the reaction energy should be negative (I just corrected the typo in my first post) as you need a lower energy than before the reaction in order to form a stable molecule.

If you have several reaction steps in between the total enthalpy should be added up but at the end of the day the formation of a (neutrally charged) CO molecule is the combination of 1 neutral C with one neutral O minus the reaction enthalpy, which has always the same energy balance.

However, your second question is more complicated to answer as indeed higher surface temperature, for example, will usually lead to an easier removal of your surface bonded particles because the thermal energy "wiggles" your top layer particles a bit lose. Hence, the etch rate should go up for higher substrate temperature.

You can get a glimpse of that (although for GaAs and InP) from this paper from page 1223 on:

http://scitation.aip.org/docserver/fulltext/avs/journal/jvstb/4/5/1.583485.pdf?expires=1470064213&id=id&accname=2120125&checksum=0F06000B4DDDF22BD8DA1EECDDA0723E

they even have a model for the temperature dependent etching rate, which I guess can be fully applied to your problem.

Good luck :)