Sputtering

Sputtering is very common for a broad range of materials. Like PLD, it is a non-thermal process based on a momentum transfer from accelerated energetic particles with energies between eV and keV to the atoms of the target material. These "sputtered" atoms are then deposited on the substrate surface.

Sputtering allows to deposit a broad range of materials with high reproducibility and scalability.

Our sputtering chamber is equipped with three sputtering guns (Nb, NiPd, Al) and an Ar ion beam gun for surface cleaning. The sputtering chamber is attached to the central transfer chamber of the UHV cluster tool. In this way it is possible to combine sputtering of metallic multilayers with various other options provided by the UHV cluster tool such as electron beam evaporation, pulsed laser deposition, or in-situ surface characterization by AFM/STM.