Surface Modification of Multiferroic BiFeOsub3/subCeramic by Argon Sputtering

摘要

Films fabricated by sputter deposit are extensively used in the semiconductor, optical and optoelectronic industries. However, studies to-date have focused only on analyzing the BFO films fabricated by sputter deposition. This paper’s research seeks to fill the gap in understanding the sputter effect on the target in order to fully understand the whole process of fabricating films by sputter deposition. In this study, 3 keV argon ions were continuously sputtered onto a target of multiferroic bismuth ferrite, BiFeO3, (BFO) with 5 mol% BaTiO3, in increasing time intervals. X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) was applied to examine the sputtered surface after each sputter time interval. This paper makes the following findings. First, the surface-contaminant carbon was almost completely removed after 5120 seconds of sputtering. Second, the study observed two-component oxygen spectra remained after sputtering. Other than the chemi- and physic-sorbed oxygen, these two oxygen components perhaps resulted from the short and long O-Fe bonds due to the displacement of the Fe3+ ions. Third, sputtering resulted in a change of the oxidation states of bismuth from dominant Bi3+ state to equally weighted Bi3+ state and metallic Bi° state. The changes of the bismuth’s oxidation states, i.e., a non-stoichiometric BFO target might alter the film compositions deposited onto the substrate. This paper shows by introducing low pressure oxygen during the sputtering, the metallic Bio on the target can be re-oxidized.