Firstly one should know the fiber material, are they glass fibers, polymer fibers metal fibers.
Secondly surface treatment- Do you want to harden the surface, chemically modify the surface, or just clean the surface.
Argon ions in argon plasma will be inert, and depending upon the energy can sputter etch your fibers.
Low energy ionic bombardment can probably harden the surface, since argon ions will be inert there will be no chemical reaction., and if etching has occurred then your fiber surface can become rough.
In case your fibers are contaminated with carbon (hand touched), then you you can clean the fibers with Ar+O2 plasma, or pure oxygen plasma. this is known as plasma cleaning, and is often done, beefore observing speciments in scanning or transmission electron microscope. But this is a very low energy cleaning process. One has to be always careful with the energy of the incident Ar, or O ions.
K. Sreenivas
I agree with K. Screenivas,
the main difference is that Argon Plasma is inert and oxygen is not.
So Oxygen Plasma will probably lead to an increased amount of O on the surface as O-Atoms can be attached. Dependend on the material and the process Parameters different O-Groups (-Oh, -COOH ...) may appear.
The sputter effect from the Ar can also lead to chemical changes as contaminants may be removed and/or the etching effect may be selective.
Topography and morphology changes (in a nm-scale) can happen with both gases (and also with any other gas) due to the etching.
Based on my expereince: If you want to clean the surface fromt any organic material without hard eatching better to use O2. If you want to hard clean with eatching the surface it´s better to use the Ar. In the 2nd case you will eatch the surface in a nm.
Ar is inert and a fairly large/heavy atom. So this plasma leads to physical etching.
O is reactive and smaller/lighter atom. This mostly leads to reactive etching also called ashing. Most carbons will react with the O and get pumped away.
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