Materials Nanostructuring Using Ion Beam Technology

Fabrication of very small nanostructures is always a challenge for todays applications eg. in nanophotonics and nanoelectronics. During the previous few years, it was shown that ion beam technology is an efficient and promising tool for surface nanostructuring of various materials. This is mainly devoted to the recent development in the technology of ion beam accelerators and ion sources leading to the production of different types of ions with large variety of parameters. Among the obtained new types of ions slow highly charges ions(HCI) were the only tool with the ability of fabrication of surface nanostructures via single ion impact, which means that each ion create one nanostructure. Moreover there is no structural modifications in the bulk, which cannot be avoided in case of highly energetic heavy ions. Another novel advantage of this method is the creation of nanostructures without further treatments as in the conventionally used lithographic methods. In this research In this project we are aiming to study the creation of surface nanostructures using HCI in strontium fluoride single crystals as a new studied alkaline-earth fluoride. The ion-irradiation will be performed using Electron Beam Ion Trap facility (EBIT) at the international ion beam center of Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden- Rossendorf (Germany). The material will be irradiated with slow highly charged ions of various kinetic energies and charge states giving the possibility of studying the deposited energy threshold for nanostructures creation as well as their size control. In addition, the materials will be irradiated with swift heavy ions (SHI) of at the tandem accelerator, which is located at the same research center. The irradiation with both HCI and SHI of various parameters is highly advantageous for reaching a better understanding of the mechanism and control of HCI-induced modification, as a new utilized novel technique. It is of importance to mention that HZDR is the only world-wide research center, which provides all the needed types of ions, covering kinetic energies from few eV up to 60 MeV. Furthermore, the novel EBIT ion source is connected to a deceleration system, giving the possibility for tuning the kinetic energy of the ions and thereby the properties of the created nanostructures. Therefore, being between such large facilities for two months is of high importance for getting complementary novel results, which can be published, similar to recent work, in the most highly ranked journals in physics. In addition, more samples can be explored in parallel during performing the experiments. Furthermore, the expected results are of importance for industrial applications, where the ability of manufacturing of controllable small nanostructures is a key factor of enormous up-to-date technological applications.