HICS: Highly charged ion collisions with surfaces

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new instrument designed to study how highly charged ions interact with surfaces, allowing independent control of charge and velocity to analyze energy dissipation and surface effects.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel experimental setup enabling independent variation of charge state and impact velocity for detailed surface interaction studies.

Findings

Data on graphene layers irradiated with Xe36+ ions.

Instrument demonstrates capability to study electronic excitation and particle emission.

In situ sample and detector preparation achieved.

Abstract

The layout of a new instrument designed to study the interaction of highly charged ions with surfaces, which consists of an ion source, a beamline including charge separation and a target chamber, is presented here. By varying the charge state and impact velocity of the projectiles separately, the dissipation of potential and kinetic energy at or below the surface can be studied independently. The target chamber offers the use of tunable metal-insulator-metal devices as detectors for internal electronic excitation, a timeof-flight system to study the impact induced particle emission and the possibility to transfer samples in situ to a UHV scanning probe microscope. Samples and detectors can be prepared in situ as well. As a first example data on graphene layers on SrTiO3 which have been irradiated with Xe36+ are presented. Key words: highly charged ions, sputtering, AFM, graphene