Post-mortem analysis of tungsten plasma facing components in tokamaks: Raman microscopy measurements on compact, porous oxide and nitride films and nanoparticles

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that Raman microscopy effectively analyzes tungsten-based plasma-facing materials, revealing surface oxides, impurity content, and thermal stability, which are crucial for post-mortem analysis of tokamak components.

Contribution

It introduces Raman microscopy as a sensitive method for characterizing tungsten oxides and nitrides, and explores how morphology affects spectral signals and thermal stability.

Findings

Raman microscopy detects native surface oxides on tungsten materials.

Porous and nanoparticle forms show higher tungsten oxide content.

Nitrogen-rich films exhibit poor thermal stability under laser heating.

Abstract

Raman microscopy is one of the methods that could be used for future post-mortem analyses of samples extracted from ITER plasma facing. This study shows that this technique is useful for studying tungsten-based materials containing impurities including oxides and nitrides. Here, we apply pulsed laser deposition and DC argon glow discharges to produce tungsten-containing synthetic films (compact, porous) and nanoparticles and investigate the influence of their morphology on the measured Raman spectra. The amounts of oxygen and/or nitrogen in the films are also investigated. Comparative data are obtained by X-ray Photoelectrons Spectroscopy, Atomic Force Microscopy, Electron Microscopies (Scanning and Transmission), Energy Dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, Time-of-Flight Elastic Recoil Detection Analysis. The power density of the laser beam used to perform Raman microscopy is varied by up to 4 orders of magnitude (0.01-20 mW/$\mu$m 2) to investigate thermal stability of films and nanoparticles. As a first result, we give evidence that Raman microscopy is sensitive enough to detect surface native oxides. Secondly, more tungsten oxides are detected in porous materials and nanoparticles than in compact films, and the intensities of the Raman band correlate to their oxygen content. Thirdly, thermal stability of these films (i.e. structural and chemical modification under laser heating) is poor when compact films contain a sufficiently large amount of nitrogen. This finding suggests that nitrogen can be substituted by oxygen during Raman laser induced heating occurring in ambient air. Finally, our methodology can be used to rapidly characterize morphology and chemistry of the samples analyzed, and also to create oxides at the micrometer scale. keywords: PLD, Raman spectroscopy, tungsten oxide, tungsten nitride, plasma wall interaction, laser heating, post-mortem analysis 2