Dual beam depth profiling of polymer materials: comparison of C60 and Ar cluster ion beams for sputtering

Dual beam depth profiling was applied in order to investigate the possibilities and limitations of C60 and Ar cluster ion sputtering for depth profiling of polymer materials. Stability and intensity of characteristic high mass molecular ion signals as well as sputter yields will be compared. For this purpose, different beam energies resulting in 2–10 eV/atom for Arn and 167–667 eV/atom for C60 sputtering were applied to various polymer samples. From our experiments, we can conclude that most of the limitations C60 sputtering suffers from could be successfully overcome and that the Ar gas cluster ion beam seems to be a more universal tool for sputtering of organic materials. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.