Improving the work function of the niobium surface of SRF cavities by plasma processing

•An in situ plasma processing for SNS SRF cavities has been developed to remove hydrocarbons from cavity surface.•Reactive oxygen plasma is very effective to remove hydrocarbons from niobium top surface.•Reactive oxygen plasma processing increases the work function of niobium surface in the range of 0.5–1.0eV.•It was observed that hydrocarbons can migrate at plasma cleaned top surface from near surface regions when waiting in vacuum at room temperature.•Multiple cycles of plasma processing with waiting periods in between was found beneficial to mitigate such hydrocarbons migration at plasma cleaned surface. An in situ plasma processing technique using chemically reactive oxygen plasma to remove hydrocarbons from superconducting radio frequency cavity surfaces at room temperature has been developed at the spallation neutron source, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. To understand better the interaction between the plasma and niobium surface, surface studies on small samples were performed. In this article, we report the results from those surface studies. The results show that plasma processing removes hydrocarbons from top surface and improves the surface work function by 0.5–1.0eV. Improving the work function of RF surface of cavities can help to improve their operational performance.